LINK Texas inmate kills self, leaves message in blood | US News | Reuters.com
"Michael Johnson, 29, was found dead at 2:45 a.m. lying in a pool of blood after he used a makeshift metal blade to cut his jugular vein and an artery in his right arm, Texas prison spokeswoman Michelle Lyons said.
She confirmed that a message written in blood was found on Johnson's cell wall, but would not disclose its contents, pending an investigation into the death.
Another source tells us what he wrote. "I didn't do it."
Crossposted at
Texas Kaos.
And so another horror from the state that ranks first in executions, first in prison populations, first in child poverty and near the bottom in public educational quaily, public health care ,child insurance. I have no desire to revisit the old debate about the death penalty in this state. Let me just say that , even if we were talking about a Death Penalty System that made a pretense of being just and fair, I would oppose it.
We are not smart enough, not persistently fair enough to implement a Death Penalty, we never will be. We have been trying, or at least the rest of the US has been trying, to get it right for decades. They have failed.. Inevitably, we will fail to provide adequate defense for those indicted on murder charges because they are disportionately poor, invisible and simply not percieved to be one of us. We can for a season, for awhile after some great outrage like this one, be unblinkered, but it will not last. Within a week, executions and the outrages of the Texas Death Penalty system will be regulated to the back pages of our papers.
It was only 6 years ago that our great Governor campaigned on his role in:
LINK
"help[ing] to fine-tune a capital punishment system that sends inmates to their deaths more efficiently than any other in America and with what critics say are fewer safeguards.
He has vetoed a bill that would have allowed counties to set up a public defender system for indigent suspects and successfully pushed for legislation to streamline the state appeals process.
The system of indigent representation in Texas is will summed up here:
LINK Texas Nears Creation of State Public-Defender System
"It is also the only populous state that has no system of organized public defenders in its big cities, that is, salaried staff lawyers who work full time on indigent defense. And Texas spends only $4.65 per capita for the defense of poor people charged with crimes, less than any other state except North Dakota.
The Appleseed report found that judges in Texas, who have almost total authority to assign lawyers for poor defendants and determine legal fees, often seemed more concerned with keeping costs down and speeding up their caseloads than with the quality of justice. In some counties, judges assigned lawyers the same flat fee, $50 to $350, whether the defendant pleaded guilty or insisted on a trial.
That flat-fee structure "creates a warped system, with disincentives, where if you make motions or raise objections for your client, you actually get paid less for your time," said Keith Hampton, legislative director of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association.
In a case cited by the foundation, a 13-year-old Houston boy who was charged with stealing a pair of sneakers from a friend was not assigned a lawyer until he walked into juvenile court for a trial. The judge then simply assigned someone from a group of lawyers sitting in the jury box.
With no preliminary discussion, the lawyer instructed the boy, "When the judge asks you a question, just say, `Yes, sir.' "
When the judge asked the boy if he had committed the theft, the boy at first answered, "No," since he had told family members he only borrowed the sneakers. His lawyer glowered at him, so the boy changed his answer to yes.
"He understands, judge; he did it," the lawyer hastily added."
This is how 90% of Texas indigent defendants get assigned counsel today. A law passed in light of the harsh national attention the state garnered in 2000 allows counties to adopt public defenders systems, but they must also fund those systems themselves.
Finally, it comes down to this: a horrible thing happened last night, and attention should be paid. The irony is that if the state had taken Michael Johnson's life , there would have been scant coverage. It is a measure of how dulled our sense of moral proprietary has become that , living where we do, we can no longer muster much outrage as the Texas death penalty system marches on.
The state that defended the proposition that a sleeping hack lawyer at a homicide defendant's table is just what the Founding Fathers meant when they said "the right to counsel" , now gives us a scene from a horror movie.
Sometimes, it is not about pandering to the worst angels of our collective nature,it is about leadership, about education, about our public officials and our candidates calling us to a higher standard. For Texas politicians, for national politicians, this is hard because we have a political cult that will do anything to get and keep power. We call them Republicans, and if anyone has the timidity of openly standing against the nightmare that is the Texas Death Penalty, he or she will be hit with a barrage of negative ads insisting that they love murders, holds parties for serial killers, call them best buddies. From Willy Horton to the present moment, this has been so. When will the nightmare end? When will someone point out that and keep pointing out that the Texas Death Penalty system is , as the Baptist General Convention of Texas states an abomination?
LINK "The practice of capital punishment in our nation and state is an affront to biblical justice, both in terms of its impact on the marginalized in society and in terms of simple fairness. How can we perpetuate a system which is clearly so unfair and so broken?"