Austin American-Statesman  -

TEXAS: Marchers gathered at Capitol demand end to death penalty

Maybe it was the anxiety so many feel in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the anthrax incidents on the East Coast.

Or maybe it was because none of the death penalty moratorium bills the legislature considered this year passed.

Whatever the reason, organizers of the second annual March for a Moratorium against the death penalty estimated that the trek to the south steps of the Capitol drew fewer than half the 700 people who turned out for the 1st march in 2000.

 There was no diminishment of passion, however, against what many marchers and speakers called legalized murder.

 "We come to say with loud voices how we respect life," Bishop Gregory Aymond of the Catholic Diocese of Austin told the crowd. "Very often the poorest and least educated do not have proper legal counsel."

 He noted that Texas executions account for 1/3 of all state executions in the United States. There have been 13 this year and 253 since the penalty was reinstated in 1982.

 Aymond asked legislators to reflect again on the need for the death penalty at their 2003 session, when state Rep. Harold Dutton, D-Houston, is expected to resubmit his proposal for a 2-year death penalty moratorium, which failed this year.

 Led by a group of drummers, the crowd for the march, which was organized by more than 2 dozen groups, chanted: "The whole world is watching; moratorium now."

 Signs carried by many people demanded an end to sleeping lawyers, execution of the innocent and people with mental retardation, and racist sentencing.

 Speaker Sandra Cook, wife of former death row inmate Kerry Max Cook, urged the legislature to "execute the death penalty" in 2003. Her husband spent 22 years in prison in Texas before DNA testing refuted evidence from the 1977 rape and murder of a Tyler woman.

 At the back of the crowd, with plastic donation buckets in hand, stood longtime death penalty opponents Ruth Epstein and Marjorie Loehlin of Austin. Epstein is a board member of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, and Loehlin, 80, is on the board of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

 Despite the failure of Dutton's and other bills against the death penalty this year, said Loehlin, at least they were up for discussion.

 "That never happened before," she said.

 "We're hoping (for passage) next time around," said Epstein.

 Would they support the death penalty if terrorists such as the ones responsible for the mass murders of Sept. 11 were facing it?

 "Not even then, I would say," Loehlin said.

 Added Epstein quickly, "But I wouldn't let them loose."