July 2021 | Page 15 of 17 | My Crime Library

Lezmond Mitchell Federal Execution

Lezmond Mitchel was executed by the Federal Government for a double murder. According to court documents Lezmond Mitchel would murder a woman and her young daughter in order to steal their vehicle. Lezmond Mitchell who was the only Native American on Federal Death Row would be executed by lethal injection on August 26, 2020

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Tribal leaders and attorneys for Lezmond Mitchell held out hope until the end that President Donald Trump would step in to stop his execution, but at 6:29 p.m. Wednesday, Mitchell became the fourth federal inmate executed this summer, and by his attorneys’ account, the first Native American since the resumption of the federal death penalty in 1994.

Mitchell, 38, died by lethal injection in Terre Haute, Indiana.Mitchell’s death sentence drew fierce opposition from the leaders of his tribe, the Navajo Nation, and the leaders of 13 other tribal nations who criticized the federal government’s actions as an insult to their sovereignty.”This is an affront to our Nation because we should be the ones to decide these matters,” the Navajo Nation said in a statement after the execution.

Attorneys for Lezmond Mitchell said the federal government “added another chapter to its long history of injustices against Native American people” with his execution. “The very fact that he faced execution despite the tribe’s opposition to a death sentence for him reflected the government’s disdain for tribal sovereignty,” attorneys Jonathan Aminoff and Celeste Bacchi said in a statement.

The Navajo Nation’s president and vice president wrote to Trump in late July asking him to reduce Mitchell’s sentence to life in prison.”This request honors our religious and traditional beliefs, the Navajo Nation’s long-standing position on the death penalty for Native Americans, and our respect for the decision of the victim’s family,” Navajo President Jonathan Nez and Vice President Myron Lizer wrote in a joint letter.

One victim’s father has since spoken out in favor of the death penalty for Mitchell, saying the Navajo Nation does not speak for him.Despite Mitchell’s petition for clemency and multiple letters to the President from leaders of several tribal nations, Trump did not act on the request to spare Mitchell from death. Lizer appeared Tuesday night in a speaking role at the Republican National Convention saying, “Whenever we meet with President Trump, he has always made it a priority to repair the relationship with our federal family.” Lizer did not mention the pending clemency petition before the President.

Mitchell was convicted in connection with the 2001 murders of a 63-year-old Navajo woman, Alyce Slim, and her 9-year-old granddaughter, Tiffany Lee, on the Navajo reservation in the northeast corner of Arizona. Prosecutors said Mitchell and his co-defendant murdered Slim and Lee, dismembering both of their bodies and burying them, so they could steal Slim’s pickup truck and use it in an armed robbery. Mitchell, who was 20 at the time of the crimes, was found guilty on multiple charges including first-degree murder, felony murder and carjacking resulting in death.

An attorney for Lee’s father, Daniel Lee, read a statement on his behalf after the execution. “I have waited 19 years to get justice for my daughter, Tiffany,” the statement read, according to a pool report. “But I hope this will bring some closure.””Had it not been for the Trump administration,” Lee’s statement said, “I do not think I would have ever received justice or a sense of finality.”Mitchell’s attorneys have said he would be the first Native American in modern history to be executed by the US government for a crime committed against another Native American on tribal land.

Under federal law, Native American tribes are given a “tribal option” to decide whether members will receive the death penalty if convicted of certain crimes, including murder.

A majority of Native American tribes, including the Navajo Nation, have not opted in to the death penalty.But federal prosecutors in Mitchell’s case found a legal loophole — they could pursue the death penalty in the carjacking resulting in death charge, which is not considered a serious crime under the law and is not part of the agreement allowing tribes to object to the death penalty.

Several judges have voiced their concern for this dismissal of tribal sovereignty, despite denying appeals from Mitchell. In April, two judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote separate opinions questioning the Justice Department’s decision to seek the death penalty in Mitchell’s case.”The imposition of the death penalty in this case is a betrayal of a promise made to the Navajo Nation, and it demonstrates a deep disrespect for tribal sovereignty,” Judge Morgan Christen wrote.

Judge Andrew Hurwitz urged the Trump administration to “take a fresh look at the wisdom of imposing the death penalty,” noting that “a proper respect for tribal sovereignty requires that the federal government not only pause before seeking that sanction, but pause again before imposing it.”Mitchell’s attorneys also raised concerns about potential racial bias in his conviction and sentencing, pointing to the fact that he was tried in a federal court 300 miles from the capital of the Navajo Nation and his jury was comprised of 11 White people and one Native American.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Mitchell’s motion to interview jurors to determine if there was racial bias in his case.Last-minute appeals to the Supreme Court and federal court in Washington, DC, were denied.”Nearly 19 years after Lezmond Mitchell brutally ended the lives of two people, destroying the lives of many others, justice finally has been served,” Department of Justice spokesperson Kerri Kupec said in a statement Wednesday evening.Mitchell is the fourth federal inmate executed this summer after the Justice Department reinstated the federal death penalty following a 17-year hiatus.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/26/politics/lezmond-mitchell-native-american-execution-supreme-court/index.html

Dustin Honken Federal Death Row

Dustin Honken was executed by the Federal Government for five murders related to a drug empire. According to court documents Dustin Honken was a meth kingpin in Iowa who was responsible for the murders of five people including two children and two informants. Authorities believe he was trying to avoid a drug investigation. Dustin Honken would be executed by lethal injection on July 17, 2020

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Nearly three decades after Dustin Honken’s crime spree gripped Iowa, the small-town boy turned murderous meth kingpin was executed Friday at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Honken’s last words were: “Hail Mary, Mother of God, pray for me.” His time of death was marked at 3:36 p.m.

Honken – a community college drop-out who created a meth empire in the early 1990s and murdered five people, including two government informants and two children, to stave off a federal drug investigation – was the third federal prisoner to be executed this week.

Daniel Lewis Lee, a white supremacist who killed a three-person family, including an 8-year-old girl, and Wesley Ira Purkey, who raped, murdered, dismembered and dumped the body of a 16-year-old girl in a septic pond, were put to death Tuesday and Thursday, respectively.

The executions were scheduled after the Department of Justice announced last year that it would begin to carry out capital punishments after a 17-year hiatus, saying “that defendants convicted of the most heinous crimes should be subject to a sentence of death.”

“We owe it to the victims of these horrific crimes, and to the families left behind, to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system,” Attorney General William P. Barr said in a statement.

While Honken’s execution is the last one in this weeklong spree, Keith Dwayne Nelson, who kidnapped and raped a 10-year-old girl, is scheduled to be executed Aug. 28.

When the time of death was announced, Honken, 52, became the first Iowan in more than 50 years to be put to death in an Iowa case. In 1963, Victor Feguer, who kidnapped and killed a Dubuque doctor, was executed by hanging at the Iowa State Penitentiary.

Iowa abolished the death penalty in 1965, but Honken was convicted in federal court due to the killing of government witnesses, which interfered with a federal case.

Like the other inmates put to death this week, Honken had appealed his sentence up until the last moments before his scheduled execution at 4 p.m. ET Friday.

But unlike the two executed earlier this week, Honken lacked headline-grabbing mitigating circumstances. In Lewis Lee’s case, his victims’ family had requested his sentenced be reduced to life in prison and in Purkey’s, his lawyers asserted that dementia and schizophrenia meant he was not competent to be executed.

The crime Honken was executed for started as a missing persons case tangentially connected to a federal drug trafficking charge. But nearly seven years after five people went missing, including witnesses scheduled to testify against Honken regarding his meth operation, a jailhouse informant would lead investigators to the victims’ bodies and a murder plot would unravel.

Honken was talented in math and science, but was an eloquent writer, too. He landed a scholarship to North Iowa Area Community College in the early 1990s.

Born into a life of uncertainty, Honken grew up in Britt, a small town in north central Iowa. His father, Jim, a drunken schemer, held powerful sway over his two sons, Jeff and Dustin, Honken’s sister, Angela Nelson, said during her brother’s murder trial.

After convincing Honken, then a recent high school graduate, to steal and copy the key to a local bank, his father robbed it. A second bank robbery would land him in prison, where he would regale his frequently visiting sons with tales of his criminal exploits.

Bumming around before starting at North Iowa, Honken fell into selling marijuana and cocaine, quickly building a list of customers who paid thousands for their fix.

Meth didn’t enter the picture until 1991, after he had completed a year of community college chemistry, earning an A- average.

Within a year, Honken and his childhood friend, Tim Cutkomp, had moved to Arizona, built a sophisticated methamphetamine cooking setup and all but perfected a recipe for pure meth, which they sold mainly through two dealers in northeast Iowa: Terry DeGeus, 32, and Greg Nicholson, 34.

By 1992, their multistate ring was netting hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But as Honken’s operation grew, so too did his dependence on meth and his singular focus on success – no matter the cost.

Soon, he would meet Angela Johnson, a woman who shared his ruthless worldview. Their attraction was mutual, and she would dump shortly dump her current boyfriend, Honken’s dealer, DeGeus, for the boss.

But what Honken didn’t know in early 1993 was that Nicholson had decided to cooperate with federal investigators, wearing a wire to a meet and recording Honken making a $3,000 deal for a future meth pickup. Honken and Cutkomp were promptly arrested on federal drug-trafficking charges.

After inadvertently learning that Nicholson had turned state’s witness, Honken and Johnson set out to find him and force him to recant his statements. They discovered him staying at the home of a friend, Lori Duncan, a single mother with two children, Amber, 6, and Kandi, 10.

Using a ruse to gain entry, Johnson and Honken did make a video of Nicholson denying his previous police statements, but then bound and gagged the adults, forced the children to pack bags and walked them at gunpoint to their car.

Johnson and Honken drove the four to a wooded area north of Mason City where Honken first took Duncan and Nicholson to an already dug grave and shot them execution-style. He then came back for the children and shot them, too.

Later, after learning DeGues also agreed to cooperate with authorities, Johnson tricked him into taking her to a vacant farm where Honken beat and killed him.

With no witnesses, the government dropped their drug case in 1995 and Honken went back to making meth. That stint was a short-lived, however, as he was picked up on new drug charges when his garage was raided in 1996.

This time, his co-conspirator, Cutkomp turned state’s witness, collecting Honken’s musings about destroying evidence, buying a gun and eliminating investigators and others who he thought would testify against him.

Investigators were sure Honken was involved with the earlier missing people; the coincidences were too great, but they were no closer to finding the bodies.

Acting on a tip that Johnson might be skipping town, authorities indicted her with aiding and abetting the murders of Nicholson, Duncan, Kandi, Amber and her ex-boyfriend DeGeus.

Law enforcement had enough evidence to believe Johnson had something to do with the murders, though Honken remained their suspected triggerman. But authorities needed five things before they could begin to prove their case: the bodies.

In jail, Johnson made friends with Robert “Bobby” Gene McNeese, a career criminal doing a life sentence who was a prolific snitch. Saying he knew a “lifer” who may take the rap for her and Honken, McNeese convinced her to tell him details about the crime only a participant would know and to draw him maps to the bodies.

Using this evidence, and testimony from a collection of prisoners Honken told in not-so-subtle terms that he killed a handful of people in 1993, prosecutors brought murder charges against the former underworld honcho.

After a two-month-long trial, the jury found him guilty on all 17 counts. They sentenced him to death specifically for the brutality and senselessness of the children’s killings.

At his sentencing in 2005, Honken recognized the victims’ families had suffered “a senseless destruction of human life” in losing their loved ones, but also declared that their “vengeance toward me is misguided.”

Honken has rarely spoken publicly since his sentencing, but maintains his innocence.

Johnson was originally sentenced to death for her part in the crime, had her sentence reduced to life in prison. She offered a measure of apology at her first sentencing in 2005, saying she wanted to tell law enforcement about the killings, but feared for her life.

“It sickens me to know what happened,” she said, “even more so not to tell anyone.”

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/07/17/dustin-honken-third-person-executed-federal-government-week/5462083002/

Wesley Purkey Federal Execution

Wesley Purkey was executed by the Federal Government for the kidnapping and murder of sixteen year old Jennifer Long in Kansas City. According to court documents Wesley Purkey would kidnap the sixteen year old girl (picture on the right above) would be murdered, dismembered and set on fire. Wesley Purkey would beat to death an elderly woman with a hammer. Purkey would be executed on July 16, 2020 by lethal injection

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In its second execution this week following a 17-year pause, the U.S. government on Thursday executed Wesley Purkey, a Kansas man who admitted to killing a Kansas City teenager in 1998.

Purkey, 68, was put to death at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. His attorneys had argued he was mentally unfit for execution because he suffered from dementia.

The U.S. Supreme Court denied his application to stay the execution hours before he was put to death.

The Supreme Court cleared the way for the execution ruling in a 5-4 decision. The four liberal justices dissented.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that “proceeding with Purkey’s execution now, despite the grave questions and factual findings regarding his mental competency, casts a shroud of constitutional doubt over the most irrevocable of injuries.” She was joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.

In 2003, Purkey was convicted in the kidnapping and killing of 16-year-old Jennifer Long in Kansas City. Purkey had dismembered her, burned the body and dumped it in a septic pond.

He was also convicted in Wyandotte County of murdering Mary Ruth Bales, 80, of Kansas City, Kansas. She was killed with a hammer.

Purkey expressed remorse in his final statement.

“I deeply regret the pain and suffering I caused to Jennifer’s family,” he said. “I am deeply sorry. I deeply regret the pain I caused to my daughter, who I love so very much. This sanitized murder really does not serve no purpose whatsoever.”

His time of death was 8:19 a.m. EDT.

Following Purkey’s execution, Jennifer’s father, William Long, told reporters that he will never have closure because his daughter is gone.

“We took care of today what we needed to take care of,” Long said, according to a video from the Indianapolis Star. “It’s’ been a long time coming. He needed to take his last breath. He took my daughter’s last breath.”

On Wednesday, a federal judge had issued a preliminary injunction that challenged Purkey’s mental competency to be executed, as he suffers from advanced Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, schizophrenia and brain damage. Purkey, his attorneys have said, did not understand why the government wanted to put him to death.

In a statement Wednesday evening, Purkey’s attorney said they recently learned the government appeared to have had “scientific confirmation in their possession of significant structural abnormalities” in Purkey’s brain that were “consistent with cognitive impairment such as vascular dementia or other conditions.”

In a post on Twitter, Sister Helen Prejean, a death penalty opponent, said each government attorney involved in “this egregious prosecutorial misconduct should be sanctioned.”

Cassandra Stubbs, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Capital Punishment Project, released a statement Thursday saying Purkey’s execution “marks a truly dark period for our country.”

“After a rushed and truncated review, the courts abandoned the constitutional prohibition on executing people who lack rational understanding of the reason for their execution in order to allow the government to proceed with the shameful execution of Wes Purkey, despite his pending competency appeal,” Stubbs wrote.

“There was no reason for this administration to restart federal executions now — after a nearly two-decade hiatus, during the worst public health crisis of our lifetime — except to distract from its many failings, particularly its failure to keep people safe during this pandemic,” Stubbs said.

Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, also noted that Purkey was executed hours after the legal warrant for his execution expired.

He said the federal government’s decision to proceed with administering a lethal injection to Purkey hours after the most recent attempt to stay his execution was struck down was “extremely disturbing.”

According to federal regulations, if an execution date passes, then the Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons will set a new date as soon as the stay is lifted. But this should be done at least seven days before the new execution date, Dunham said.

“To say to somebody who is in the execution chamber, ‘good morning, we’re going to execute you now,’ is not acceptable legal notice,” he said, adding that due process requires Purkey and his attorneys be given time to respond.

“It’s behavior we haven’t seen before from any administration, Republican or Democratic,” Dunham added.

In many states, when a death warrant expires, the prisoner goes back to his cell and the witnesses go home, he said. Then the process of selecting a new date and selecting witnesses begins again.

Last month, the U.S. Justice Department set the execution dates for Purkey and three other federal death row inmates, the first to be carried out by the federal government in nearly 20 years.

An Aug. 28 execution date has been set for Keith D. Nelson, who kidnapped, raped and killed a 10-year-old Kansas City, Kansas, girl in 1999.

Daniel Lewis Lee, the first man executed this week, also saw the path cleared for his execution by a 5-4 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, with the liberals dissenting as in Purkey’s case.

On Tuesday, Lee was executed by lethal injection. He had been convicted in Arkansas of killing a family of three.

The execution date for the remaining death row inmate, Dustin Lee Honken, has been set for Friday in Terre Haute. Honken was convicted of killing five people in Iowa, including two children.

https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article244259352.html

Daniel Lee Federal Execution

Daniel Lee was the first person to be executed by the Federal Government in 17 years. Daniel Lee would be sentenced to death for murdering a family of three who were tortured, killed and thrown into a lake. Daniel Lee codefendent Chevie Kehoe was sentenced to multiple life without parole sentences. Lee would be executed on July 14, 2020.

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Daniel Lewis Lee, a convicted killer, was executed Tuesday morning in the first federal execution in 17 years after the Supreme Court issued an overnight ruling that it could proceed.

Lee was pronounced dead by the coroner at 8:07 a.m. ET in Terre Haute, Indiana. His last words were “I didn’t do it. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life but I’m not a murderer. You’re killing an innocent man,” according to a pool report.

The Supreme Court cleared the way for the resumption of the federal death penalty in an unsigned order released after 2 a.m. ET Tuesday.

The court wiped away a lower court order temporarily blocking the execution of Lee in a 5-4 vote.

Lee, a one-time white supremacist who killed a family of three, was scheduled to be executed Monday. A federal judge blocked the planned execution of Lee, and three others, citing ongoing challenges to the federal government’s lethal injection protocol.

Ruth Friedman, Lee’s attorney, said in a statement Tuesday, “It is shameful that the government saw fit to carry out this execution during a pandemic.”

“It is shameful that the government saw fit to carry out this execution when counsel for Danny Lee could not be present with him, and when the judges in his case and even the family of his victims urged against it,” Friedman said. “And it is beyond shameful that the government, in the end, carried out this execution in haste, in the middle of the night, while the country was sleeping. We hope that upon awakening, the country will be as outraged as we are.”

An appeal seeking to delay the execution that involved family of Lee’s victims who were concerned about traveling and going to a federal prison during the coronavirus pandemic was also denied by the Supreme Court in an order Tuesday morning.

Earlene Peterson — whose daughter, granddaughter and son-in-law were tortured, killed and dumped in a lake by Lee and an accomplice — has opposed Lee’s execution, telling CNN last year that she did not want it done in her name.

Baker Kurrus, an attorney for the victims’ family, told CNN Tuesday morning the family is “heartbroken” and said “the government prevented them from being there and family did everything they could to be there.”

The Supreme Court said in its ruling that the death row inmates, including Lee, bringing the case “have not established that they are likely to succeed” in their challenge in part because the one drug protocol proposed by the government — single dose pentobarbital — has become a ‘mainstay’ of state executions.”

Attorney General William Barr said Lee “finally faced the justice he deserved.”

“The American people have made the considered choice to permit capital punishment for the most egregious federal crimes, and justice was done today in implementing the sentence for Lee’s horrific offenses,” Barr said in a statement.

Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, reiterated in one dissent something he has said before: he thinks it’s time for the court to revisit the constitutionality of the death penalty.

“The resumption of federal executions promises to provide examples that illustrate the difficulties of administering the death penalty consistent with the Constitution,” he said.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan and Ginsburg, wrote separately to criticize the court’s “accelerated decision making “

“The court forever deprives respondents of their ability to press a constitutional challenge to their lethal injections,” she said.

In 2019, Barr moved to reinstate the federal death penalty after a nearly two decade lapse.

Barr directed the Bureau of Prisons to move forward with executions of some “death-row inmates convicted of murdering, and in some cases torturing and raping, the most vulnerable in our society — children and the elderly.” The scheduled executions reignited legal challenges to the specific protocol used in executions and reinvigorated a debate concerning the constitutionality of lethal injection.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/11/us/death-penalty-family-plea-daniel-lewis-lee/index.html

Billy Wardlow Texas Execution

Billy Wardlow was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of an elderly man. According to court documents Billy Wardlow, who was eighteen at the time, would murder 82-year-old Carl Cole during an attempted robbery. Critics argued that at eighteen his brain had not fully formed however the Texas court system felt different. On July 8, 2020 Billy Wardlow was executed by lethal injection

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The state of Texas executed Billy Joe Wardlow on Wednesday night for a 1993 East Texas robbery and murder. It was the state’s first execution since the coronavirus swept through the state.

In late appeals, Wardlow’s lawyers argued that his death should be stopped because of the dangers presented by the rising pandemic and his young age at the the time of the crime. Neuroscientists and a group of Texas lawmakers also raised concerns with sentencing people who had committed crimes under 21 to death because of brain immaturity. All of Wardlow’s appeals were denied by the U.S. Supreme Court just after 6 p.m., the scheduled time of execution.

Sitting in a holding cell, Wardlow was then taken into the Texas death chamber at a Huntsville prison, placed on a gurney and connected to an IV. His fiancee, lead attorney and two other friends stood nearby in another room, according a prison witness list. A friend of the murder victim was also present.

At 6:28 p.m, Wardlow was injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital. He waspronounced dead 24 minutes later.

During Texas executions, witnesses for the inmate and the murder victim regularly stand closely together with prison officials, chaplains and reporters in separate but adjacent rooms. Because of the coronavirus — including active cases of infected inmates and employees at the prison housing the death chamber, a Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesperson said Tuesday that all witnesses would have their temperatures checked, be required to wear masks and stay 6 feet apart. He did not say how that would be possible, citing security concerns. Twenty-six people were named on the witness list.

Wardlow, who declined to give a final statement in the death chamber, sent a letter last month to the parole board and spoke of how he changed during his quarter of a century on death row.

“I came to death row a scared boy who made poor choices; I will leave death row a man that others admire because I weathered the storms of life with the help of people that loved me,” Wardlow wrote the board. “We should all be so fortunate.”

Wardlow was 18 when he killed82-year-old Carl Cole in Cason. Wardlow shot Cole during an attempted robbery in which he said he had planned to steal Cole’s truck to leave the rural town and start a new life with his girlfriend.

Prosecutors argued Wardlow intentionally killed Cole, shooting him between the eyes. Wardlow said he hadn’t planned to fire the weapon and shot Cole during an unexpected struggle. After the killing, Wardlow and his girlfriend fled and were later arrested in South Dakota.

After 25 years on death row, Wardlow, aided by neuroscientists, asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that at 18, he was too young to face Texas’ death penalty. Nearly 60 Texas lawmakers also informed the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, which could recommend a delay to the execution, thatthey plan to take up the issue of age and the death penalty in the 2021 Legislature. But on Monday, the board voted against halting the execution until then.

The parole board also received letters from two jurors at his trial who said they now believe Wardlow should have gotten a life sentence based on new research.

“I have since that time … come to the conclusion that because of Mr. Wardlow’s youthful age at the time this crime was committed, we could not have predicted how he would turn out when he grew into adulthood,” Bob Seale wrote in a letter to the board after Wardlow’s legal team reached out to him.

Since 2005, the Supreme Court has held that death sentences are unconstitutional for those 17 or younger at the time of the crime because of their vulnerability, comparative lack of control and still-undefined identity. Some state and lower federal courts have questioned in recent years whether the upper limit of 18 is too young as new science emerges that shows the brains of people ages 18 to 20 are “functionally indistinguishable” from those of 17-year-olds in terms of moral culpability, according to Wardlow’s brief.

In a plea to stop his execution and invalidate his death sentence, Wardlow asked the high court to rule that the death penalty is unconstitutional for those under 21 — but just in Texas. That’s because a Texas death sentence requires a jury to unanimously agree that a person convicted of capital murder would likely be a future danger to society — a decision Wardlow’s attorney and a group of brain researchers said is impossible to make for an 18-year-old.

“No technology or methodology available now or at the time of Mr. Wardlow’s sentencing makes it possible reliably to predict whether someone who commits a crime at the age of 18 will remain dangerous in the future,” wrote numerous neuropsychologists, neuroscientists and related professional groups in a brief to the Supreme Court supporting Wardlow.

The Morris County district attorney countered that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals already dismissed the recent appeal and that it was filed too late to be considered. Death penalty appeals must overcome certain procedural bars, like providing new evidence that was previously unavailable, to warrant a court to review new claims after the first set of appeals concludes.

Outside of the courts, Wardlow’s age at the time of Cole’s death also drew the attention ofa group of Texas lawmakers. In June, state Rep. Nicole Collier, D-Fort Worth, chair of the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee, and 57 other Democratic state representatives and senators told the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles in a letter the issue deserves “thoughtful examination.”

“We intend to further explore this issue and take it up in the next legislative session” which begins in January, the June 5 letter states. “We write to inform you of this intention, lest Mr. Wardlow be executed before we consider an issue that might impact his case.”

In Texas, the parole board can recommend that the governor reduce a death sentence to life in prison or halt an execution for a certain amount of time. Wardlow asked the court to delay his execution for 330 days, until the end of the next legislative session in May.

On Monday, the parole board denied the request in a 6-1 vote.

Gov. Greg Abbott can also halt an execution for 30 days without a board recommendation, but he has never done so. As the clock reached 6 p.m. Wednesday, several Democratic and a Republican Texas state representatives called on the governor to stop Wardlow’s death.

“When there are questions left to be answered – as a result of new science or new evidence – we should always, always err on the side of life,” state Rep. Jeff Leach, a Plano Republican and chair of the House Judiciary and Civil Jurisprudence Committee, tweeted at Abbott.

Aside from the petition focused on his age, Wardlow‘sother late appeals focused on issues connected to a recent ruling against the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on ineffective death penalty attorneys. He alsoasked the Texas Supreme Court and Abbott to halt his execution because of the coronavirus pandemic. The court denied the motion Wednesday morning, and Abbott took no action.

Before Wednesday, Texas hadnot held an execution since the pandemic took hold of the state in March — a long stretch for the state that carries out the most executions by far. The Court of Criminal Appeals halted four scheduled executions from March to May “in light of the current health crisis and the enormous resources needed to address that emergency.”

But last week, as Texas coronavirus numbers trended upward, with record-high counts of hospitalizations and infections, the court denied a request to halt Wardlow’s execution because of the coronavirus without an explanation. In an unusual motion, Wardlow’s lawyers then asked the Texas Supreme Court to step in — a court that rarely handles death penalty issues.

Wardlow’s attorneys argued that the trial court’s order setting an execution date violatedthe state’s Supreme Court emergency order during the pandemic to stop “proceedings that pose risks to parties, attorneys and the public.”

Texas executions are held at the Huntsville Unit in Huntsville, a prison that on Wednesday reported active infections among inmates and staff in a city that has seen a high surge of cases, largely due to the fact that it has seven prisons and many prison employees. Wardlow’s attorneys argued that holding an execution was still too dangerous, potentially exposing to the virus employees who have to attend the execution, witnesses and the community.

Wardlow wasthe thirdperson to be executed in Texas this year and the second in the country since the coronavirus swept the nation.

https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/08/texas-execution-billy-wardlow/