Another week, another refusal by Texas to reconsider a death row case. Actually, make that two refusals.
Robert Lee Thompson, 34, was executed last night in Huntsville, just an hour after Gov. Rick Perry had declined to commute his sentence to life. Perry was presented a rare commutation recommendation from the state’s Board of Pardons and Parole, which had voted 5-2 in favor of a life sentence for Thompson, who was convicted under the “law of parties” — meaning he participated in the crime but didn’t pull the trigger. Perry decided to ignore the board and authorize the execution.
In another case, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals yesterday rejected an appeal from Max Soffar (left), who has been on the state’s death row for 28 years for a crime he says he didn’t commit. Soffar, who is mentally ill, was convicted of killing four people in 1980 after giving what he and advocates say was a false confession.
Thompson’s case isn’t an innocence claim, but a question whether we should execute participants in murders, even when the killer isn’t executed. He isn’t an innocent bystander, but his execution should serve as a stark reminder of the arbitrariness of the system.
Thompson and another man, Sammy Butler, were allegedly on a crime spree in Houston when Butler shot and killed a 29-year-old convenience store clerk. Thompson didn’t just stand there, however, he shot another clerk and apparently ran out of ammunition just before killing him. Butler got life without parole, Thompson was executed last night.
Max Soffar is a different story. Soffar’s attorneys say he was convicted based on a false confession and courts have repeatedly denied him the chance to prove his innocence. He is represented by attorneys at the ACLU and the Texas Innocence Network, and his appeals won’t end with yesterday’s rejection. But it’s a setback and a clear sign of a broken system that refuses to hear evidence of innocence before it sends an innocent person to death.
“Once again, this case demonstrates that serious error riddles the criminal justice system,” said Brian Stull, staff attorney with the ACLU Capital Punishment Project. “When the state seeks a person’s death as punishment, we must demand a process that produces accurate and reliable results. When an innocent man sits on death row for 28 years having never received a fair trial, when juries are not allowed to hear the evidence, and when appeals courts do not intervene to fix these problems, no one can trust the process.”
Another Texas death row case I’ve covered here recently is that of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for allegedly setting a fire that killed his three daughters. Several arson experts have reviewed the case since his execution, and the unanimous consent is that there is no evidence it was intentionally set. Last week, the Texas State Senate heard testimony from the new chairman of a state forensic science panel.
Of the 49 executions so far in the U.S. in 2009, 23 have been in Texas. For the Lone Star State to keep up its pace of executions, the state must be willing to set aside doubts about innocence and fairness. The result of this commitment to frequent executions is guaranteed injustice.
(Views expressed here are mine alone and don’t represent any of the organizations involved in these cases.)