Black mayors back execution moratorium

The nation's black mayors offered their unanimous support Friday for a moratorium on the death penalty, citing the over-representation of minorities on death row and growing questions about the fairness of evidence analysis as reasons for their stance.

"There are too many questionable cases of people on death row where they did not get proper representation or all of the technology available to them, such as DNA," said Marilyn Murrell, president of the National Conference of Black Mayors, which is meeting in Houston this week.

Murrell, mayor of Arcadia, Okla., said leaders have a responsibility to do whatever is necessary to make sure those on death row belong there.

"After someone is executed, it is too late to ask if they were innocent," she said.

The mayors' action capitalizes on a unique opportunity to influence the debate over judicial fairness and capital punishment, analysts say.

Political leaders representing minority constituents have long been concerned about the over-representation of blacks and Hispanics on death row, reports the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, but attempting change in a country where approximately 70 % support capital punishment was a political dead end.

But much has changed in the past 2 years. The fairness issue is troubling death penalty advocates and opponents who question the conviction of the innocent, the mentally retarded and those who received inadequate counsel. Houston's forensic nightmare stemming from a sloppily run Police Department crime lab has put hundreds of convictions into question, including those of 17 death row inmates.

Also, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week that a Texas inmate should have been allowed to appeal his capital conviction based on the prosecution's decision to strike 11 of 12 qualified black jurors. That decision could affect convictions across the country.

"The way you open this discussion has changed some," said George Kendall, NAACP Legal Defense Fund staff lawyer. "The opportunities exist that didn't before."

The mayors approved a resolution, which was recommended by the group's criminal justice committee, that parallels a bill pending in Congress. It calls for a moratorium on the federal death penalty and recommends that states follow suit. Hundreds of cities and counties have passed similar resolutions within the past week.

"There is concern about the death penalty and its impact on certain classes of people," said Harvey Johnson, the president-elect of the conference and mayor of Jackson, Miss.

Opponents of the measure, such as Dianne Clements, president of Houston-based victims advocacy group Justice for All, noted that the mayors do not have the power to enforce a moratorium and that their resolution has no binding influence. Justice For All is opposed to calls for moratorium, she said, because the deterrent effect of the death penalty would be just as weakened by a moratorium as it would be by abolishing the death penalty.

The criminal justice committee's debate Thursday was led by Brown, a former police chief facing serious questions about the work of the city's police crime lab, which has processed evidence that has been used to send hundreds of people to prison.

Brown limited his comments about the HPD crime lab to a description of its problems and a call for the restoration of public trust. He has requested an independent investigation from the U.S. Department of Justice but has taken no other steps to ensure such a probe occurs.

Brown did say generally a neutral lab, independent of law enforcement, may be the best way to achieve correct and unbiased analysis.

"Until you can convince me there is no disparity, racially or economically, I am a proponent of life without parole. I believe that is our best bet," he said.

HPD shut down the DNA division of its crime lab in December because an outside audit exposed numerous shortcomings, including undertrained analysts, unsound science and conditions ripe for evidence contamination. Brown conceded in February that he knew for months the roof over the crime lab leaked -- a situation that auditors said endangered fragile biological evidence -- but took no immediate action to resolve the problem.

Brown has maintained that while he knew the roof leaked, he did not know it was affecting the lab's work.

Travis asks lawmakers to postpone executions--Commissioners urge moratorium, study of death penalty system

Taking a small poke at a rock solid Texas institution, the Travis County Commissioners Court on Tuesday called on the Legislature to order a temporary halt to executions in the state.

By a 3-1 vote, the court made Travis the 1st Texas county to pass a resolution alleging flaws in the administration of the death penalty and to urge a moratorium and an in-depth study of the system.

"The moratorium is the right thing to do," County Judge Sam Biscoe said before the vote. He later said he supports the death penalty if there is no doubt that it is being administered fairly but doesn't believe that is happening.

State Rep. Terry Keel, R-Austin, a former Travis County sheriff and former assistant district attorney who prosecuted two death penalty cases in the county, said the resolution is "even more silly than the (Austin) City Council's resolution against the war."

"The decision to prosecute capital crimes is made at the county level. The imposition of capital punishment is made at the county level in the Travis County Courthouse by juries summoned by the county," Keel said. "In light of this, such a political statement coming from a county commissioners court is absurdity."

Commissioner Gerald Daugherty, the lone Republican on the county's primary governing board, voted no, and Commissioner Karen Sonleitner abstained.

The Commissioners Court sets the budget of the district attorney's office, but Biscoe said there are no plans to alter funding and said the resolution he sponsored is not meant to be an indictment of local prosecutors.

District Attorney Ronnie Earle declined to comment. The Travis County district attorney's office prosecuted six of the 450 people on death row and 5 of the 302 who have been executed in Texas since the death penalty resumed in 1976.

Texas leads the nation in the use of the death penalty, accounting for more than 1/3 of executions during that time.

With the evolution of DNA testing and the subsequent exoneration of some of those wrongly convicted, concern about the fairness of the system that executes people has swelled.

The issue was thrust forward in Texas last winter when media reports and a subsequent audit of the police crime lab in Houston threw into question evidence used in hundreds of convictions in Harris County, including some involving the death penalty.

Last month, Houston Mayor Lee Brown asked Gov. Rick Perry for a moratorium on the death penalty in some Harris County cases until new DNA testing could be completed. Perry refused Brown's request.

Proponents of a statewide moratorium cited Houston in appealing to the Commissioners Court on Tuesday.

"How much confidence can we have in any of the labs at this point?" said David Atwood of the Texas Moratorium Network, a group that advocates a moratorium.

It is believed that the only local government statewide to pass a similar resolution is the tiny City of Hays, with 250 people, in northern Hays County. The City Council passed a resolution 2-1 in 2001, Council Member Harvey Davis said.

Several attempts to secure a resolution requesting a state moratorium in a large city or county have failed, Atwood said.

El Paso County commissioners briefly passed a resolution similar to Travis' in December, but they repealed it the same day after the county's district attorney objected. A week later, family members of victims of violent crimes gave passionate testimony to commissioners, and the resolution was never brought to a vote again.

The resolution approved in Travis County alleges a number of problems with the system that convicts and kills people in Texas, including racial and socioeconomic factors in the imposition of death sentences and the absence of uniform procedures to ensure equality in the use of capital punishment from county to county.

"We seem to take life very lightly . . . that it's OK to execute great numbers of people, and that bothers me," Commissioner Margaret Gmez said.

After the meeting, Daugherty refused to comment on his vote.

Sonleitner said she has no doubt about the justice process in Travis County and couldn't vote yes because of the memory of the county's victims of violent crime, about whom she learned during her years covering crime and courts as a television news reporter.

"These are people I did not know, but I got to know through their families and friends," she said, her voice cracking with emotion after she recited names of more than a dozen murder victims.