November 17, 2012
Dates are subject to change due to stays and appeals
| December | |||||
| 12.04.12 | George Ochoa | Oklahoma | executed | ||
| 12.11.2012 | Roy Ward | Indiana | Stay likely | ||
| 12.11.2012 | Manuel Pardo | Florida | executed | ||
| 12.12.2012 | Rigoberto Avila | Texas | Changed to 4/10/2013 | ||
The condemned prisoner’s mother sobbed and wailed as she witnessed the lethal injection. Hughes’ sister was at her side.
“You know I’m innocent and I love you both,” Hughes, 46, said as his mother cried loudly.
“Please continue to fight for my innocence even though I’m gone.
“Give everybody my love.”
He took several deep breaths and then stopped moving. His mother, seated in a chair near the death chamber window, cried out: “My baby … I haven’t touched my child in 23 years.”
Hughes was pronounced dead at 7:52 p.m. local time, 15 minutes after the lethal drug began flowing into his arms. No one representing his victims witnessed the punishment.
Hughes became the 15th Texas prisoner executed this year and the second in as many nights.
The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to stop tonight’s scheduled execution
November 16, 2012 http://www.austinchronicle.com
At press time, the state was readying to carry out the Nov. 15 execution of Preston Hughes III, set to become the 15th inmate executed this year and the 492nd inmate executed since reinstatement of the death penalty. Hughes was sentenced to death for the 1988 double murder of 15-year-old LaShandra Charles and her 3-year-old cousin, Marcell Taylor, who were found stabbed to death on a weed-choked trail behind a Fuddruckers in far West Houston (see “Framing the Guilty?,” Nov. 2). Although Charles’ carotid artery and jugular were severed, the first HPD detective arriving at the scene later claimed that Charles was awake and able to talk – and to tell him that she knew her attacker, whose name was Preston. Police quickly moved to a nearby apartment complex, where they found Hughes. Police say they found evidence in his apartment that matched the crime, including a pair of fashion glasses that Charles had been known to wear as an accessory.
Hughes’ appeals have been unsuccessful despite a plethora of evidence that suggests either that he is the wrong man, or that he was framed by police despite being guilty: Evidence records reflect that police logged evidence into custody several hours before they had permission to search Hughes’ apartment. Notably, the glasses that police considered a direct link between Charles and Hughes were not on the evidence list; Hughes’ attorney and supporters believe they were planted in the apartment some time in the hours after Charles was discovered. Moreover, when asked by the Chronicle this fall to review the autopsy evidence, Tarrant County Deputy Medical Examiner Lloyd White concluded that it would have been medically impossible for Charles to have been conscious and talking after sustaining such a fatal injury.
Hughes‘ attorney Pat McCann has filed several recent appeals – including one that raises the question of police having planted evidence – each of which has been denied. Meanwhile, California-based blogger John Allen, known online as the Skeptical Juror (www.skepticaljuror.com), has helped Hughes to file a flurry of pro se writs; each of those also has been denied, clearing the way for Hughes’ execution this evening, Thursday, Nov. 15.
November 13,2012 http://www.dailymail.co.uk
A death row inmate set to die Thursday is pinning his final hopes on convincing people that his victim’s dying words never happened.
When police found La Shandra Charles bleeding from neck wounds in a west Houston filed in 1988, they claimed she whispered the name of her assailant, ‘Preston,’ before dying.
That evidence, along with the police assertion that the girl said her attacker lived nearby, were key bits of evidence in convicting Preston Hughes 11, a New York-born warehouse worker.
But Hughes attorney now says it would be medically impossible for the girl to tell police anything about her attacker and he’s got medical testimony to prove it, the Houston Chronicle reports.
‘It is simply not medically feasible that this young woman, particularly given the fact that one’s heart rate accelerates during stress, and thus blood loss occurs more rapidly, could have spoken to the officers as they claimed,’ wrote Dr. Robert White, Dr. Robert White, who was chief medical examiner in Nueces County before joining the Fort Worth forensics department.
Defense attorney Pat McCann said it would take roughly 13 minutes for police to reach Charles after she was injured, a time frame that does not allow her to be conscious by the time authorities found her with the wounds she sustained.
Assistant District Attorney Lynn Hardaway has brushed aside McCann’s argument: ‘That’s obviously this guy’s opinion.’
Hardaway further noted that in the original police report an unnamed medical technician is supposed to have heard the dying girl’s accusation.
But the technician never testified.
A state pardons board is to review Hughe’s request to have his sentence commuted Tuesday.
Hughes, 46, was convicted of the murders of both Charles and her cousin, Marcel Taylor, 3, who was also stabbed.
At the time of his arrest, Hughes was on probation for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl, though he maintained innocence in that crime as well.
After his in the 1988 case, he offered two confessions to police but they contained contradictory statements.
In an interview at the time, he said the police didn’t type what he said.
He claimed that on the night of the murder he met with friends for drinks.
When he returned home he took his dog for a walk, crossing the field where the children were murdered.
He then went back to his apartment where he stayed until police knocked on his door.
‘I didn’t hear or see anything,’ he said. ‘I never killed anyone.
since then, prosecutors have also tied Ramón Hernandez, 39, to the murders of two young girls and say he could be responsible for even more killings.
But Rico Valdez, who serves as the appellate division chief for the Bexar County District Attorneys Office, fears Hernandez may take the answers to those unsolved murders to the grave since prosecutors are nearly out of time. It is the eleventh hour for Bexar County prosecutors seeking a confession on at least two more murders from Hernandez and they are doing everything they can in the next 24-hours to get him to talk.
“We’re still hopeful in the hours that we have left that we’ll have that opportunity, but there are no guarantees,” explained Valdez.
Valdez has been working to get a confession from Hernandez on two unsolved murders ever since the DA’s office first learned about the cases.
According to Valdez, “Jennifer Taylor and Laura Gamez, they disappeared or they were last seen in November 9, 1994 and their bodies were discovered April 15, 1995 the next year.”
The young girls’ bodies were discovered on a ranch belonging to Hernandez’ uncle in Bandera County one year after they were killed.
“Unfortunately, because the bodies had been exposed to the elements we weren’t able to obtain any DNA linking Hernandez directly to the crime.”
But he added Hernandez’ style of killings from the murder and rape of Rosado from 2001 and two young cousins: Sarah Gonzales and Priscilla Almarez in 1994 matches the murders of Taylor and Gamez.
The DA’s office was able to obtain indictments for Hernandez in the killings of those two cousins dating back to 1994. The deaths of Taylor and Gamez are still considered unsolved.
The DA’s office has once again reached out to Hernandez through his attorney in recent days to get answers in those unsolved cases. He has declined speaking to them again. However, prosecutors remain optimistic that he will change his mind.
November 13, 2012 http://www.mysanantonio.com
Ramon Hernandez is set to be executed Wednesday for the 2001 abduction, rape and killing of Rosa Maria Rosado.
But the man prosecutors have called a serial rapist and murderer is known to have other victims.
Rosado, whose body was found in a shallow grave near Loop 1604 and UTSA Boulevard, was the first of five victims authorities connected to Hernandez or named him as suspect. It was his only conviction.
The single mom, 37, was snatched from a bus stop near Highway 90 and Military Drive. She was bound with tape, had her head covered and was driven to a Culebra Road motel, where she was killed.
By the time Hernandez was linked to Rosado’s homicide, the families of Sarah Gonzales, 13, and Priscilla Almares, 12, had been searching seven years for answers in the young cousins’ killings.
“I can’t explain the feeling; I can’t explain the hurt,” said John Gonzales, father of Sarah and uncle to Priscilla. “Unless you walk in my shoes, you just can’t imagine it. You’re kind of numb. There’s disbelief it happened.”
For Gonzales, there also was disbelief that police had found his daughter’s killer. But after they told him about DNA evidence that linked Hernandez to the crime, he finally could stop searching.
Hernandez also is the main suspect in a 1995 Bandera County case involving two teens reported missing about a month before Sarah and Priscilla.
At the time of all of the homicides, Hernandez was on parole for breaking into a house and allegedly raping a woman.
While Hernandez wasn’t convicted in the killings of Sarah and Priscilla, Gonzales said justice was done because authorities announced they closed the case using DNA.
Gonzalez said no one from their family planned to witness the execution.
Hernandez, 41, declined to comment. His attorney, Robin Norris, requested a commutation of Hernandez’s sentence to life without parole, arguing that his client was a party to the crime but didn’t rape or kill Rosado.
Norris pointed to Hernandez’s co-defendant, Santos Minjarez, as the main culprit.
Minjarez also was sentenced to death in a separate trial. He died of natural causes in Jan. 2012 before his execution was set.
Hernandez was afraid of Minjarez and he also was withdrawing from addictive medication prescribed as part of his parole, Norris said.
The medication was to treat anxiety and post traumatic stress disorders that developed after Hernandez watched his father get shot in front of him, he added. That made Hernandez more susceptible to Minjarez’s suggestions, Norris said.
“Clearly he’s responsible in some measure for this,” Norris said. “But in the past, the governor has commuted a sentence if the person didn’t commit the offense by his own person.”
The status of the commutation request wasn’t available. Both Hernandez and Minjarez pointed to each other as the murderer in their separate trials, according to previous stories. Prosecutors pointed to Sarah and Priscilla’s cases to show a pattern.
“They were like sisters,” Gonzales said. “They disappeared together. They found them together and we buried them together.”
The two girls last were seen on Timbercreek Drive the evening of Dec. 16, 1994. They were expected at their church for caroling, Gonzales said. Their bodies were discovered in Rodriguez Park the next day.
At least the girls were found quickly, Gonzales said.
That wasn’t the case with Laura Gamez and Jennifer Taylor, both 15 when reported missing two days apart in November 1994, previous reports state. Their bodies weren’t found until April, 1995, according to previous stories.
After San Antonio police linked Hernandez to Rosado, Sarah and Priscilla, Bandera County authorities revealed he was the prime suspect in the deaths of Laura and Jennifer.
An autopsy couldn’t determine rape, but they had been strangled, a previous report states.
The Express-News was unable to find the families of either teen.
Bexar County First Assistant District Attorney Cliff Herberg said recently that investigators still hoped to talk to Hernandez about the unsolved cases.
Whether Rosado’s family planned to attend the execution wasn’t known. Rosado’s sister declined to comment. Attempts to reach Rosado’s daughter weren’t successful.
She was 14 when her mom was killed and the first to report her missing after Rosado failed to come home from a night shift at a telemarketing firm April 1, 2001, court documents said.
“Mom, please call and let me know you are OK,” read a sign she posted in her neighborhood, a previous report said. “I miss you, please come home. Love Patricia.”
Hernandez’s girlfriend Asel Abdygapparova led police to Rosado’s body five days after she was abducted.
Then 26 and a University of Texas at San Antonio exchange student from Kazakhstan, Abdygapparova was pregnant with Hernandez’s child, who would be born after her arrest.
She was with Hernandez and Minjarez when Minjarez spotted Rosado as a possible robbery victim, previous stories said.
They grabbed her from the bus stop and took her to the motel, she told police. She left to buy a shovel and bleach while Rosado was raped.
Police first considered Abdygapparova a witness but later arrested her. Prosecutors wanted the death penalty.
She feared Hernandez and was under control, she said during testimony in her defense. Jurors sentenced her to life in prison but an appeals court overturned that decision in 2007. She’s still in Bexar County Jail awaiting a new trial.
Her attorney didn’t return calls for an interview request.
Gonzales takes no comfort in Hernandez’s execution. It took many years of praying to forgive Hernandez and to tame the anger he felt.
“It festers inside of you; it eats you up and can totally destroy you” he said.
He and knows the pain Hernandez’s mother will feel. He does not wish that on anyone, he said.
“I did tell his mom that one day she would walk in my shoes,” Gonzales said. “I said to her when he did go to prison she would have the opportunity to write him or go visit him. Now for me, for my family, when we want to go see (Sarah and Priscilla), we can’t physically see them. We go anyway. … They are just shells now. Their spirits are in Heaven.”
“I’m really sorry. I never meant to cause you all so much pain,” Roberts said to Bowen’s father, who was seated in a chair close to a glass window in the death chamber viewing area. “I hope you can go on with your life.
“I loved your daughter. I hope to God he lets me see her in heaven so I can apologize to her and see her and tell her.”
Roberts also asked two of his friends who watched through another window to tell his own daughter he loved her.
He repeated that he was sorry and took several deep breaths as the lethal dose of pentobarbital began taking effect. He snored briefly before slipping into unconsciousness, and was pronounced dead 23 minutes later.
Last Meal: Same shit salad being fed to every other thug on the row that day
October 30, 2012 http://www.beaumontenterprise.com
HUNTSVILLE, Texas — Donnie Lee Roberts, convicted in his girlfriend’s 2003 slaying, was taken from his death row cell Wednesday and moved to the Texas prison where executions are carried out, one of the final steps before his scheduled lethal injection.
After the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review Roberts’ case earlier this week, no additional appeals were filed to try to block his execution, which will be the 12th this year in the nation’s most active capital punishment state.
Roberts, now 41, is being put to death for fatally shooting Vicki Bowen and taking items from her East Texas home to sell or trade to support his drug habit. At the time of his arrest for the October 2003 killing, Roberts had violated his probation for a robbery conviction in Louisiana by fleeing to Texas after dropping out of a drug treatment program.
Authorities said he apparently met Bowen, 44, a dental assistant, at a bar and moved in with her at her home on Lake Livingston, about 75 miles northeast of Houston. Their relationship soured because Roberts wasn’t working and was abusing drugs and alcohol, investigators said, and he shot Bowen after she refused his demand for money.
Roberts was arrested at a suspected crack house in Livingston when a truck missing from Bowen’s home was spotted there the same day Bowen’s body was discovered.
“He was cooperative and confessed several times,” District Attorney Lee Hon said. “He was saying he wanted the death penalty.”
Roberts told authorities he made several trips from the house where Bowen was shot, collecting property that he took into town to sell and trade for crack.
He also surprised detectives by confessing to the shotgun death of a man a decade earlier in Natchitoches Parish, La. Louisiana authorities initially believed the victim, Al Crow, had died of asphyxiation in a fire at the camper trailer where he was living but reopened the case following Roberts’ disclosure, found shotgun pellets and determined it was a homicide.
Roberts was charged with murder but not tried for Crow’s death.
Stephen Taylor, one of Roberts’ lawyers at his Texas capital murder trial, said the confessions complicated his trial defense.
“It’s almost like somebody saying he was a serial killer, that he’s killed before and he killed again,” Taylor said. “It’s one thing to say you have the right to remain silent. Use it!
“It’s always sad for someone to lose his life, especially for something so stupid.”
Bowen didn’t show up for work on Oct. 16, 2003, and a co-worker who went to check on her found her body wrapped in a blanket and lying in a pool of blood. A medical examiner determined Bowen was killed with two gunshots to her head.
Roberts took the witness stand and tried to blame Bowen for the gunfire, saying he was acting in self-defense by grabbing a .22-caliber rifle after seeing her reach down inside a couch to locate a pistol that was kept there.
“The jury obviously disagreed,” Hon said.
Evidence at trial showed Roberts had a record for battery while being held in jail in Fulton County, Ga., that he’d threatened his wife to give him money for drugs, and that he demanded a single-person cell in Polk County when he was jailed for Bowen’s murder or there would be another killing.
His robbery conviction in Louisiana was for a Mother’s Day 2001 convenience store holdup in Baton Rouge, La., where the knife-wielding Roberts threatened to slice the throat of the female clerk.
“He was a bad dude, pretty violent,” Hon said.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice Polunsky Unit, where the state’s male death row is housed, has been Roberts’ home since his capital murder conviction in 2004. The unit is just outside Livingston and not far from where Bowen was killed.
On Wednesday, Roberts was moved about 45 miles west to the Huntsville Unit prison, where he is to be executed.
Three more Texas prisoners are set to die in November, including one next week.
October 25, 2012 Texas Tribune
LIVINGSTON — Preston Hughes III, a death row inmate, is 46 but seems much older, with white hair, thick glasses and a quiet, slow voice that rises only when the subject of his lawyer comes up.
Mr. Hughes, convicted in 1989 of fatally stabbing two young people, has tried multiple times to dismiss his court-appointed lawyer, Patrick McCann. He said that Mr. McCann, who has been his lawyer for 14 years, had not raised his claims of innocence and is “helping the state cover this up.”
Mr. McCann says he cannot comment on why he will not pursue these claims, which were not introduced in Mr. Hughes’s original trial. But Texas and federal law set a high burden of proof for new claims of “actual innocence” so late in the judicial process, a bar that Mr. McCann said was “almost impossible” to meet.
Mr. Hughes, who says he did not commit the murders, is scheduled to be executed Nov. 15. He says all of his lawyers have failed him. “They just want to do things on their own,” he said recently from death row in Livingston.
While Mr. McCann is suing the state over lethal injection procedures, arguing that prison officials would be “experimenting” on his client, a handful of advocates are publicizing what they believe is new evidence of Mr. Hughes’s innocence.
The advocates, who do not have legal training, are campaigning for Mr. Hughes’s exoneration and supporting his efforts to have Mr. McCann fired.
The issue of advocates’ doubting the work of lawyers is common in death penalty cases, especially as an execution date nears.
“Once the lawyers do the spadework, a lot of people want to come in,” said Jeff Blackburn, a lawyer who runs the Innocence Project of Texas, “and they don’t understand that we’re limited with the art of the possible here.” He called Mr. McCann a “great lawyer.”
The official facts of the crime, on their face, pointed directly to Mr. Hughes. On the night of Sept. 26, 1988, Shandra Charles, 15, and her cousin Marcell Taylor, 3, were fatallystabbed in a Houston field. A police sergeant reported that before she died, Ms. Charles identified the name “Preston” and said, “He tried to rape me.”
Detectives located Mr. Hughes in a nearby apartment complex. Investigators found evidence of blood on his clothing and a knife in his apartment, as well as Ms. Charles’s eyeglasses on his couch. Mr. Hughes, who said the glasses were planted, confessed to the murder during the investigation but then denied involvement during the trial. No biological evidence tied him directly to the crime.
Convicted and sentenced to death in 1989, Mr. Hughes had multiple appeals rejected. Then, this year, several unlikely advocates became interested.
John Allen, 64, a retired engineer in California, writes a blog called The Skeptical Juror. With the help of Barbara Lunsford, an accountant in Corpus Christi, and Ward Larkin, an activist from Houston, he has spent nine months and more than 100,000 words delvinginto the forensic and legal details of Mr. Hughes’s case. None of the three are affiliated with an official organization, and while Mr. Allen has written about other convictions in the past, he said he had stopped looking at other cases for now.
After reviewing documents related to the trial, appeals and evidence, he deduced that Ms. Charles must have lost brain function within two minutes, and she could not have told the police the name of her attacker. “This is a seemingly overwhelming case” of innocence, Mr. Allen said, adding that he also believed that the victim’s glasses were planted in the apartment, based on his review of crime scene photographs.
In September, Mr. McCann said he had never heard of Mr. Allen’s investigation. This week, he said Mr. Allen “sounds like a very sincere man who is attempting to right a wrong.”
“Like in fantasy football,” he said, “I think lots of people are happy to offer thought without skin in the game.”
As for Mr. Hughes’s petitions to have him replaced, Mr. McCann said he thought they were the product of desperation. “When a person is drowning,” he said, “they sometimes try to fight the guy holding a life preserver.”
Mr. McCann agreed that Ms. Charles would have “been unconscious in a matter of seconds based on the blood loss,” and so she could not have said Mr. Hughes’s name to the police. Despite being troubled by this evidence, he is not filing a claim of innocence.
“I find myself in an odd position,” he said, “because I’m ethically bound not to advance a claim I think is false.”
Mr. Allen learned about the case while investigating the work of James Bolding, the head of blood analysis for the Houston Police Department’s crime lab at the time, who testified at Mr. Hughes’s 1989 trial. Mr. Bolding tested for blood on Mr. Hughes’s knife while he was in the courtroom. Mr. Hughes said the blood came from a rabbit he had killed months before.
Judge George Godwin said at the time that he found the “cavalier attitude and lackadaisical attitude of doing tests right while we’ve got a jury waiting to come in and hear testimony unacceptable.” He nevertheless ruled that the testimony was permissible.
Mr. Hughes said he trusted Mr. Allen more than his lawyer, Mr. McCann. In September, Mr. Hughes filed a petition to have Mr. McCann replaced, and a court rejected it.
Mr. McCann plans to follow the case to the end. In September, he sued the Texas prison system, saying that by using a single drug for the execution, as a result of a recent policy change, officials would be experimenting on his client. The Court of Criminal Appeals, Texas’ highest criminal court, has ordered the civil court overseeing the case not to stay Mr. Hughes’s execution.
Mr. McCann does not know when the court will rule. “The unfortunate timing of this is it’s before a contested election,” he said.
Murray Newman, a Houston defense lawyer, said he believed Mr. McCann was doing his best and cared about Mr. Hughes. “He works so hard on these cases. It’s like losing a family member,” Mr. Newman said.
From death row, Mr. Hughes sees it differently, as he plays basketball during his hour of recreation every day, eats food he calls “pitiful” and learns about court decisions from a small, black radio.
“We don’t like each other,” he said of Mr. McCann. “I don’t feel somebody who doesn’t like me is going to do anything for me.”
Dates are subject to change due to stays and appeals
Pennsylvania execution dates and stays are generally not listed because the state routinely sets execution dates before all appeals have been exhausted.
NOVEMBER 16 , 2012
| November | ||||
| 11.06.12 | Garry Allen | Oklahoma | EXECUTED | 6.10 p.m |
| 11.08.12 | Mario Swain | Texas | EXECUTED | 6.39 p.m |
| 11/08.2012 | Hubert Michael | Pennsylvania | STAY | |
| 11/13/2012 | Brett Hartman | Ohio | EXECUTED | 10.34 a.m |
| 11/14/2012 | Ramon Hernandez | Texas | EXECUTED | 6.38 p.m |
| 11/15/2012 | Preston hughes | Texas | EXECUTED | 7.52 p.m |
OCTOBER 18, 2012 http://abclocal.go.com
HUNTSVILLE, TX – The U.S. Supreme Court stopped the execution Thursday of a 33-year-old Texas prisoner for gunning down an off-duty Houston police sergeant 14 years ago.
Anthony Haynes had been set to die for the shooting death of Sgt. Kent Kincaid, 40, while the officer was with his wife driving in their own vehicle not far from home. Their SUV had been struck by an object from a pickup truck, cracking its windshield. When Kincaid got out to talk to the people in the truck and told them he was a police officer, he was shot in the head.
The high court ruling came about three hours before Haynes could have been taken to the death chamber.
Haynes confessed to the May 1998 slaying, was tried for capital murder the following year and sentenced to death.
His lethal injection would have been the 11th this year in Texas, the nation’s most-active death penalty state. Another is set for next week.
Evidence showed the object that hit the Kincaids’ SUV was a .25-caliber bullet from the same gun used to shoot him. Testimony at Haynes’ 1999 trial in Houston showed that same evening Haynes had committed a series of armed robberies.
Haynes’ trial lawyers showed “virtual abdication of their duty” by failing to more fully investigate and present evidence of Haynes’ good character to jurors who were deciding his punishment, his appeals attorney, A. Richard Ellis, told the high court in his appeal.
He also contended prosecutors unfairly painted Haynes, who was 19 at the time of the shooting, “as an out-of-control, violent and unpredictable individual who was subject to intermittent fits of rage.”
“This picture was totally at variance with his actual character,” Ellis said.
The appeal also faulted attorneys at earlier stages of Haynes’ appeals for not addressing the trial defense issues and contended lower court rulings and Texas appeals procedures unfairly kept Haynes from raising the claims now. Similar appeals in recent Texas death penalty cases have failed to win reprieves from the high court although at least one other did. That case, involving prisoner John Balentine, is set for conference before the justices for later this month.
The arguments center on a Supreme Court ruling favorable to an Arizona prisoner who couldn’t find a way to make an appeal under procedures in that state. Texas attorneys argued the statutes in Texas were different, did allow for appeals like the one Haynes wanted considered and that courts had determined the Arizona ruling had no effect in Texas.
State attorneys contesting Hayne’s appeal argued his previous attorneys didn’t abandon him and shouldn’t be considered ineffective because they chose issues different from those now being pursued by Ellis.
“Haynes does not now present any compelling reasons for this court to review his claims,” Jeremy Greenwell, an assistant Texas attorney general, told the justices.
Greenwell pointed out evidence of Haynes’ history of explosive temper outbursts, of police being summoned to deal with his threats against a school nurse and an ROTC instructor, that he assaulted his 3-year-old sister and tried to kill the family dog.
“He was no angel,” Mark Vinson, the Harris County district attorney who prosecuted Haynes, recalled last week.
Kincaid’s wife couldn’t describe the shooter and provided only a cursory description of the truck but said she was certain her husband identified himself as a police officer, a distinction important in that it allowed prosecutors to try Haynes for capital murder and make him death-penalty eligible. Haynes’ trial lawyers said he didn’t know the man who approached was an officer and feared for his own safety.
One of the robbery victims earlier the evening of the shooting identified a companion of Haynes as participating in the holdup, and that led detectives to Haynes. He took police to separate sites miles apart where he left the gun and ammunition clip.
October 18, 2012
Anthony Haynes, 33, would be the 11th inmate executed this year in Texas and the 33rd in the United States, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The execution is scheduled for after 6 p.m. (2300 GMT) in Huntsville.
Haynes fired a shot from his truck at a Jeep Cherokee carrying off-duty Houston police officer Kent Kincaid and his wife, Nancy, according to an account of the case from the Texas attorney general’s office.
The officer got out of his Jeep and approached Haynes‘ truck, telling him that he was a police officer and asking to see his driver’s license, the account said.
Nancy Kincaid said during Haynes’ trial that her husband was reaching for his badge when the driver shot him in the head, according to a Houston Chronicle account at the time.
“(The driver) pulled his hand up and I saw the flash and I heard the pop,” Nancy Kincaid testified. “That was the end. He then went down.”
Kent Kincaid was declared brain-dead at the hospital.
That same night, Haynes had committed several armed robberies, Texas officials say.
“I’m not a vicious psychopath who goes around wanting to take people’s lives,” Haynes told the Houston Chronicle in a 2001 death row interview. “There was no intent to kill a cop. He did not ID himself until a second before I shot him.”
Haynes has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, raising questions about whether his trial lawyers were effective.
Anthony Haynes claimed he didn’t know that Kent Kincaid was a Houston police sergeant when he shot him in the head back in 1998. Kincaid was off-duty and driving his personal vehicle when Haynes drove by; something cracked Kincaid’s windshield, and he reportedly thought Haynes had thrown something at him. He followed Haynes, and when the 19-year-old stopped his car, Kincaid approached him. Kincaid said he was a police officer, but Haynes later said he didn’t know whether to believe him. When Kincaid reached behind his back, presumably for a badge, Haynes pulled out a .25-caliber gun and shot him.
Haynes blamed the tragedy in part on drugs and falling in with a bad crowd of people who reportedly made a game out of shooting at the windshields of passing cars and then robbing the drivers after they stopped. As it happened, the crack in Kincaid’s windshield was made by a bullet. Jurors in Haynes’ case deliberated for three days before sentencing the teen to death.
That sentence was overturned, however, after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Haynes’ defense that an unusual jury-selection setup in Haynes’ case had denied his right to equal protection under law. Indeed, two different judges presided over Haynes’ jury selection; one heard prosecutors interview individual jurors, and a second heard the lawyers’ arguments for striking from service the potential jurors. As it turned out, the state used its power to strike all but one of the black potential jurors, arguing that it was not their race that excluded them (which would be illegal), but their “demeanor.” But Haynes’ appeal attorney argued that the judge who allowed those strikes had not actually witnessed the jurors’ questioning and thus could not actually have seen whether their demeanor would be a basis on which to have them struck. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately disagreed with the 5th Circuit, ruling that there was no rule that would require a judge to “personally observe” the juror questioning when deciding whether a juror is lawfully struck from service.
Haynes is scheduled for execution today, Oct. 18. STAYED
Bobby Lee Hines was also just 19 when he was sentenced to death for the robbery and strangling of 26-year-old Michelle Haupt in her Dallas apartment. Now, 20 years later, he’s scheduled to die for that crime on Oct. 24. But his attorney, Lydia Brandt, argues that Hines’ execution should, once again, be stayed while the courts consider whether his lawyers have done enough to save his life.
Hines was convicted of the 1991 murder of Haupt, who was stabbed repeatedly with an ice pick and strangled with a cord inside her apartment. Hines had been staying next door with the apartment complex’s maintenance man. Police found items from Haupt’s apartment, including packs of cigarettes and a bowl of pennies, under a couch where Hines had been sleeping.
Hines’ first date with death was stayed in 2003, while the courts considered a claim that he was mentally retarded and thus ineligible for execution. Although Hines had a diagnosed learning disability and was considered emotionally disturbed, the courts ruled that he didn’t meet the criteria for relief. His execution date was reset for June 2012, but was stayed again so that further DNA testing could be performed. The DNA evidence confirmed Hines’ guilt and once again his execution was back on.
Now, Brandt is again seeking a stay, arguing that Hines’ case has been plagued by ineffective assistance of counsel. Brandt’s latest appeal, filed Oct. 10 with the Court of Criminal Appeals, argues that none of Hines’ defense attorneys ever investigated his background for mitigating evidence that could have swayed a jury to sentence him to life in prison. Hines had a “nightmarish” childhood that featured chronic abuse by his racist, alcoholic father, and later by foster parents, and was profoundly affected by his mother’s decision to abandon him as a young child. But the jury never heard anything of Hines’ troubled background. The question now before the CCA is whether the prior counsel’s failings can create an avenue for reconsidering Hines’ punishment. Brandt believes it should: “Fundamental rules of equity will not suffer a right to be without a remedy,” reads the appeal
