Dennis Elias’s Latest Tweet :. Injustice News Twitter Feed :.Mark Bennett | September 2, 2009
Cameron Todd Willingham died at age 36. Convicted of capital murder in Corsicana, Texas in 1991 for the fire death of his three daughters, Willingham was executed in 2004. The evidence against Willingham? A jailhouse snitch, Johnny Webb, who alleged that Willingham had confessed to him that he took “some kind of lighter fluid, squirting [...]
Mark Bennett | May 23, 2009
“There is no comparison between the crimes and the sentence,” said Sheik Fadhil al-Janabi, a Sunni tribal leader in Anbar Province. “That soldier entered an Iraqi house, raped their underage daughter and burned her with her family, so this sentence is not enough, and it is insulting for Iraqis’ honor.” (NYTimes.com) When I read that [...]
Mark Bennett | March 23, 2009
I wrote way back in ought-seven about how criminal-defense lawyers are unembarrassable. I find my unembarrassability challenged by this: Houston lawyer Jerome Godinich has blown deadlines to file writs of habeas corpus for death row prisoners three times. In [two of the] cases, the lawyer waited until after business hours on the last day an [...]
Mark Bennett | January 15, 2009
Here’s People v. Doolin, a California Supreme Court case in which the convicted defendant complained that he hadn’t received effective representation because there was a conflict of interest between his lawyer and him. The lawyer had an arrangement (standard at that time) with the county under which he estimated the amount of expert and investigative [...]
Mark Bennett | December 7, 2008
This year Harris County sent nobody to death row (Rick Casey, today’s Chronicle). Previous years: 2003 = 9 2004 = 10 2005-2007 = 7 total all per Casey (the Death Penalty Information Center says 3 in 2005 and 3 in 2006; I couldn’t find a specific number for 2007). These numbers reflect a turn away [...]
Mark Bennett | October 26, 2008
That the following is a question that a court can even ask, shows that the system is seriously broken: Whether Davis can still be executed if he can establish innocence under the second standard [clear and convincing evidence that no reasonable fact finder would have found him guilty] but cannot satisfy his burden under the [...]
Mark Bennett | June 14, 2008
Given that Americans’ second most common justification for the death penalty’s fairness is its provision of “satisfaction and closure” to the victim’s loved ones, it’s astounding to me that Kelly Siegler (“Prosecutor-for-Hire”, according to her tagline) admits in a blog post that there’s no such thing as closure (H/T AHCL). A successful death penalty prosecutor [...]
Mark Bennett | May 23, 2008
Collin County DA John Roach has, after 18 months in which his office spent 5,000 man-hours and more than $47,000 re-investigating the case, announced that there is no longer a good-faith basis for upholding the conviction of Michael Blair: Therefore, under my duty to not only uphold the law but to see that justice is [...]
Mark Bennett | May 20, 2008
On September 21, 2006 Juan L. Quintero was pulled over by a police officer and arrested for driving without a license. The officer cuffed Quintero’s hands behind his back, searched him, and put him in the back of his patrol car. Then the officer got into the front of his patrol car. Quintero shot the [...]
Mark Bennett | October 16, 2007
Death penalty enthusiasts are chortling about Judge Sharon Keller’s action in closing the courthouse doors to Mr. Richard. A common theme among their responses is “blame the lawyers.” One [anonymous] sample, in comments to my first post on the subject: Why didn’t the lawyers who needed to file do so BEFORE the court closed????? That [...]
Bad Behavior has blocked 2490 access attempts in the last 7 days.
