TMN's April Newsletter - Keeping You Informed to Take Action

 (April 23, 2004)

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Dear Reader,

On Thursday, April 22nd, three Texas death sentences were thrown out. Texas' highest criminal appeals court overturned the conviction and death sentence of Kenneth Vodochodksy, found guilty in the 1999 slaying of an Atascosa County sheriff's deputy. The court also commuted the death sentence for Willie Mack Modden, convicted of the 1984 killing of a Lufkin woman. And a 

federal appeals court reversed the conviction of Max Soffar, saying he did not have effective counsel during his trial.

Despite the above good news, there are two upcoming scheduled executions that warrant your attention. Please click the links below to read more about the cases of James Clark and Kelsey Patterson, then take action. Clark has mental retardation and Patterson has mental illness.

Last month, we asked you to take action and urge Governor Perry to commute Joe Lee Guy's death sentence to life in prison. At least 185 people on this email list responded and emailed the Governor.

Thank you! If you haven't emailed Perry yet about Joe Lee Guy, please visit our website and take action.

Many of you attended county conventions across Texas in March and sent us hundreds of petition signatures calling for a moratorium. Again, Thank You!

We will be heading to Houston on June 18-19 to ask the Texas Democratic Party at their State Convention to endorse a moratorium. There will be about 8,000 people attending the convention. We will need at least twenty volunteers to help collect petition signatures at the convention, so please email us at <"http://rs6.net/tn.jspt=hn8pa9n6.ern5b9n6.orsf9yn6.9nmriun6.3919&p=mailto%3Aadmin40texasmoratorium.org">admin@texasmoratorium.org if you can help. Some of our Democratic members will also be holding a meeting of the "Death

Penalty Reform Caucus" at the state convention.

Sincerely,

Texas Moratorium Network

Death row inmate released pending new trial

A Texas death row inmate who claimed he had falsely confessed involvement in the 1980 murders of 3 youths in a Houston bowling alley has been ordered released from prison pending a new trial by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The order marks the 2nd time Max Soffar, a petty thief and occasional police informant, has been ordered released by the court. 3 years ago, a 3-judge appellate panel granted Mr. Soffar a new trial, but the full court later overturned the order.

Mr. Soffar's Washington-based attorney, James E. Schropp, believes this order will likely stand.

"We are very pleased for Max, who has been wrongfully incarcerated in the incredibly harsh conditions of Texas' death row for nearly 24 years," Mr. Schropp said Thursday. "As the majority opinion recognizes, Max was, in numerous ways, not fairly treated by the justice system in Harris County, and that's the only reason he was found guilty."

The appeals court rested its ruling primarily on Mr. Soffar's claims of ineffective counsel.

In July 1980, 3 youths were murdered and another was badly wounded in a Northwest Houston bowling alley robbery. Although Mr. Soffar confessed 3 times to police, no forensic evidence was found to link him to the crime scene, and vast discrepancies between his varying statements and the accounts of several witnesses were never called into question by Mr. Soffar's court-appointed attorney.

Mr. Soffar, now 47, subsequently recanted those confessions, contending that he had tried to implicate a fellow drug user who had burglarized his mother's home. The other man was questioned but never charged in the crime.

Judge Harold R. DeMoss, who wrote Wednesday's 111-page opinion, had long maintained Mr. Soffar's actual innocence. When the full court reinstated Mr. Soffar's death sentence, Judge DeMoss wrote an agonized dissent.

"I have laid awake nights agonizing over the enigmas, contradictions, and ambiguities which are inherent in this record. However, my colleagues ... have shut their eyes to the big picture and have persuaded themselves that piecemeal justice is sufficient in this case. ... I am glad I will not be standing in their shoes, if and when Soffar is executed."

(source: Dallas Morning News)

A tale of 2 crimes that end differently

2 women, the same unspeakable crime, but opposite verdicts.

A Houston jury found Andrea Yates, who drowned her 5 children in the bathtub in 2001, guilty. She is serving a life sentence for murder.

Last week, a Tyler jury found Deanna Laney, who killed 2 of her sons by beating their heads with a rock and seriously injured her 3rd son, not guilty by reason of insanity.

All the explanations for why Yates is guilty and Laney is not guilty fail to satisfy. Any way you look at it, these 2 cases reveal the glaring vagaries of the criminal justice system.

Some think the different verdicts may be explained by the fact that prosecutors in the Yates case picked a jury willing to deliver a death sentence. Such a jury might be less sympathetic to a defense of insanity. The prosecutors in Laney's trial did not seek the death penalty.

But mental health experts also reached differing conclusions. 5 psychiatrists in Laney's case agreed she was unable to tell right from wrong at the time she killed her children. None disagreed, even though Laney did not have a documented history of mental illness, as Yates did.

In Yates' case, psychiatrists disagreed about whether she knew right from wrong at the time she drowned her children.

As a result, Yates is in prison serving a life sentence. Laney is in a maximum-security state mental hospital and, presumably, could be released if she is determined to be mentally competent.

The different verdicts reveal the need for Texas to reconsider its insanity defense law.

One possibility suggested by Joe Lovelace, a public policy consultant with the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in Texas, is for the state to offer a "guilty but mentally ill" verdict.

A jury could find a defendant "guilty but mentally ill," sentence that person to a certain length of prison time, but then send him or her to a state mental hospital for treatment. When the prisoner is determined to be competent, he or she then would go to prison for the remainder of the sentence, getting credit for time served in the hospital.

The similar crimes of Laney and Yates - and their differing verdicts - show the need for Texas to re-examine how it deals with insanity cases.

(source: Editorial, San Antonio Express-News)