CRIMINAL JURISDICTION

Criminal Law Blog by Defense Lawyer John Floyd and Mr. Billy Sinclair

October 30, 2010

THE COST OF MURDER-THE PRICE OF INNOCENCE

Filed under: Homicide Crimes Lawyer — Tags: , , , , , — johntfloyd @ 3:02 am

Anthony Graves Exonerated: Blatant Prosecutorial Misconduct of D.A. Charles Sebesta Sent Innocent Man to Death Row for 18 Years

By: Houston Criminal Lawyer John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair

A recent Iowa State University study, conducted by sociology professor Matt DeLisi, found that the total cost to society for a single murder in the United States is $17.25 million. Professor DeLisi led a team of five Iowa State graduate students in a study of 654 convicted and incarcerated murderers. This enormous price tag is measured in terms of costs to the victims, the criminal justice system, loss of productivity to both the victim and offender, and estimated costs to society to prevent future violence.

DeLisi’s study, titled Murder by the Numbers: Monetary Costs Imposed By A Sample of Offenders, was published in the February 2010 edition of the Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology. This latest study by Professor DeLisi, and his student colleagues, draws heavily from a 2003 study based on the 654 convicted and incarcerated murder offenders housed in eight states: Texas, Ohio, New Jersey, Florida, Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Oklahoma. Using these 654 offenders, DeLisi’ latest study concluded that each murder they committed cost $17,252,656 with the most violent offender individually racking “costs greater than $150 million.” The study added:

“That each murder costs more than $17.25 million does not convey the true costs imposed by homicide offenders in the current sample. Since the mean homicide conviction was more than one, the average murderer in these analyses actually imposed costs approaching $24 million. For the offender who murdered nine victims, the total murder-specified costs were $155,457,083!”

But what about the price tag associated with wrongfully convicting an innocent man for multiple murders. The banner headline of the Houston Chronicle(10-28-10) informed its readers thatAnthony Graves, who had been incarcerated 18 years (most of which was spent on death row) for six murders committed in 1992 in Burleson County, was released from jail after District Attorney Bill Parham filed a motion to dismiss all charges against the condemned inmate. The Graves case has a tortured history: Graves’ youngest brother, Author Curry, told the police, and eventually the jury that convicted and condemned Graves to death, that Graves had been at home sleeping on the night of the massacre of Bobbie Davis, her 16-year-old daughter, and four grandchildren, ages 4 to 9.

(more…)

March 9, 2010

TEXAS DEATH PENALTY PROCEDURE UNCONSTITUTIONAL?

Filed under: Death Penalty Crimes Lawyer — Tags: , , , , — johntfloyd @ 12:37 am

Judge Acknowledges Innocent People Have Likely been Executed

Harris County Criminal District Court Judge Kevin Fine on Thursday, March 4, 2010, created a tsunami of controversy in the Texas legal community when he reportedly made a comment that he was declaring the state’s death penalty unconstitutional. The comment was made during a hearing on a motion filed by defense attorneys in the case of John Edward Green Jr. who is facing a capital murder charge. What Judge Fine actually did was to declare Article 37.071 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure unconstitutional which is the statute that outlines the procedures for imposing the death sentence in this state.

“Are you willing to have your brother, your father, your mother be the sacrificial lamb, to be the innocent person executed so that we can have a death penalty, so that we can execute those who are deserving of the death penalty?” Judge Fine mused from the bench. “I don’t think society’s mindset is that way now.”

The reaction to Judge Fine’s comment/ruling was immediate and volatile. Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos issued a statement respectfully disagreeing with the ruling: “We respectfully, but vigorously, disagree with the trial judge’s ruling, as it has no basis in law or fact. Words are inadequate to describe the Office’s disappointment and dismay with the ruling; sadly it will delay justice for the victims and their families. We will pursue all [appeal] remedies.”

But Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Attorney General Greg Abbott were not so understanding in their reactions to Judge Fine’s ruling. Abbott called the decision “an act of unabashed judicial activism.”

(more…)

October 5, 2009

TEXAS GOV RICK PERRY IMPEDES INQUIRY ABOUT WHETHER TEXAS EXECUTED AN INNOCENT MAN

Filed under: Death Penalty Crimes Lawyer — Tags: , , , , — johntfloyd @ 11:46 am

Governor’s abrupt Dismissal of Chairman, Two Members of Texas Forensic Science Commission on Eve of Hearing Smacks of Political Cover-up

By: Houston Criminal Defense Lawyer John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair

It is one thing for a governor to have possibly presided over the execution of an innocent man but quite another for that governor to effectively shut down an official investigation into whether the forensic evidence used convict the man was reliable.

That’s precisely what Texas Gov. Rick Perry did on September 30, 2009 when he abruptly replaced three members of the Texas Forensic Science Commission two days before the commission was scheduled to hear testimony from a renowned forensic expert who has cast serious doubts on the forensic evidence that sent Cameron Todd Willingham to his death on February 17, 2004 under Perry’s watch.

The governor has denied any ulterior personal or political motives for the firing of commission chairman Sam Bassett, an Austin attorney, and two other commission members. Bassett was instrumental earlier this year in securing the services the highly touted Maryland fire scientist and expert named Craig Beyler. The commission charged Beyler with the very specific task of determining whether the forensic evidence used to convict Willingham was reliable and satisfied nationally recognized scientific standards for the use of such evidence in arson cases. Beyler was not charged with the task of making a determination of whether or not Willingham was actually innocent.

“He [Beyler] appears to be one of the pre-eminent people in the fire and arson investigation field,” Bassett was quoted as saying in a January 27, 2009 Chicago Tribune article. (more…)

July 21, 2009

MENTALLY RETARDED TEEN GETS 100 YEARS

Filed under: Sexual Assault Crime Attorney — Tags: , , , , , , — johntfloyd @ 3:29 am

Mentally Disabled Youth with IQ Of 47, Allowed to Plead Guilty to Sexual Assault of a Child, Judge Orders Sentences to be Served Consecutively

By: Houston Criminal Defense Attorney John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair

The jury said it did not like the sentencing options made available to it. The judge said he was not pleased that he had to sentence an 18-year-old Paris, Texas teenager to 100 years in prison. The district attorney said he “sympathized” with teenager’s situation but it had to be remembered that he “committed a violent sexual crime against a little boy.”

What exactly did Aaron Hart do? A neighbor said she discovered the mentally retarded teenager, who has an IQ of 47, fondling her stepson last November. Hart was arrested and charged with five counts of aggravated sexual assault of a child and indecency with a child.

Hart’s attorney allowed the mentally disabled youth to plead guilty at the punishment phase of his trial but elected to have the jury assess punishment at the penalty phase. After hearing all the evidence, jurors were not convinced that prison was the best option for Hart. They sent notes to the judge requesting guidance on possible alternatives to imprisonment. Jurors told the media following the trial that the judge’s responses did not provide them with any “clear answers.” They assumed the judge would impose concurrent sentences on the five convictions.

But that is not what the judge did. He sentenced Hart to 5-year terms on two counts and 30-year terms on three counts. The judge ordered the sentences to be served consecutively for a total of 100 years. Lamar Count Judge Eric Clifford’s offered the lame excuse that he didn’t believe he had any other sentencing options because “in the state of Texas, there isn’t a whole lot you can do with people like him.” (more…)

June 17, 2009

DNA CHICKENS COME HOME TO ROOST

Filed under: Sexual Assault Crime Attorney — Tags: , , , , , — johntfloyd @ 3:11 am

City of Houston Sued; Disgraced Crime Lab on Trial After Wrongfully Convicted Man Exonerated After 17 Years in Prison

By: Houston Criminal Defense Attorney John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair

George Rodriquez was a 26-year-old young man in 1987 when he was convicted of raping a 14-year-old girl in Harris County. A critical piece of evidence that led to his conviction was a pubic hair found in the girl’s underwear. A serologist with the Houston City Police Department’s crime lab, who we now know had a history of fabricating evidence to suit local prosecutorial and law enforcement needs, determined that the hair did not belong to a suspect named Isidro Yanez but the serologist did not eliminate Rodriquez as the owner of the hair. Seventeen years later DNA, which was not used as evidence in criminal trials in 1987, established that the hair in fact belonged to Yanez and not to Rodriquez.

At age 43 Rodriquez was released from the Texas prison system to be embraced by three daughters who had grown up while he was wrongfully imprisoned. He was able to visit the grave site of his deceased father who had not survived long enough to see his son vindicated. It was indeed a hard 17-year ordeal. There is no comfort for innocent men in prison—not even from their fellow inmates, especially if they have been convicted a sex offense against a child. The “sex offender” stigma places these individuals at the bottom of the prison subculture. The only real support they have are family members who refuse to accept the validity of the “criminal conviction” imposed upon their loved one.

It’s now payback time. George Rodriquez is now appearing before a local federal court where his attorney Barry Scheck, co-director of New York’s Cardozo School of Law’s Innocence Project, is demanding that the City of Houston to pay his client “tens of millions” of dollars in damages for the 1987 wrongful conviction. In his opening statement in U.S. District Court Judge Vanessa Gilmore’s courtroom, Scheck told jurors: “We will prove a false and misleading serology report violated [Rodriquez’s] constitutional right to a fair trial.”

Scheck announced his intention to call former Harris County District Attorney Johnny Holmes and former Houston Police Chief Lee Brown as witnesses. Attorney Robert Cambrice, who is representing the City of Houston, did spare the rod of accountability for Holmes or Rodriquez’s defense attorney. The Houston Chronicle reported (June 17, 2009) that Cambrice laid the blame for Rodriquez’s wrongful conviction “on bad lawyering by the prosecutor and Rodriquez’s late defense attorney that led to the false conviction, not an unquestioned lie by a city employee.” (more…)

June 11, 2009

THE HARRIS COUNTY CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

Filed under: Sexual Assault Crime Attorney — Tags: , , , , — johntfloyd @ 3:07 am

Past Abuses, Hopes for Better Future

By: Houston Criminal Attorney John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair

Three recent stories in the Houston Chronicle exposed serious flaws in the Harris County criminal justice system. The first story concerned a 60-year prison term imposed on Andrew Wayne Hawthorne, a serial child molester. Hawthorne molested an eight year old boy in the fall of 2002. A crime for which a wrongly accused man, Ricardo Rachell, was convicted and sentenced to prison.  Ricardo Rachell was convicted for this sexual assault and spent more than six years in the Texas prison system before readily available DNA evidence at the time of his arrest was finally tested and established his innocence.

We have written about this travesty of justice in previously but what disturbed us most about the recent Chronicle article (June 5, 2009; http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6457829.html ) were the photos of Rachell and Hawthorne. Rachell’s face at the time the photo was taken, and as it appeared at the time of his arrest and subsequent conviction, was horribly disfigured by a shotgun blast. There is no way these two men could have been mistaken for each other.

Unless, of course, the child victim was influenced into making the mistaken identification by someone bent on revenge and who was convinced that the disfigured Rachell, a neighborhood “freak,” was the man who molested the boy. The Houston Police Department accepted the child’s mistaken identification without any meaningful independent investigation to determine if the identification was correct. As a result, an innocent man spent six years in prison for something he didn’t do – and even with his innocence established through DNA testing, he will forever have the haunted memories of years in Texas prison labeled as a child sex offender.

The second Chronicle story (June 6, 2009) involved the release of a U.S. Justice Department report that found poor access to health care in life-threatening situations, unnecessary use of physical force, denial of mental health care, and inattention to suicide prevention violates the constitutional rights of inmates in the Harris County Jail. (more…)

March 25, 2009

FLDS REVISITED: ONE YEAR LATER

Filed under: Child Abuse Crimes Lawyer — Tags: , , , , , — johntfloyd @ 11:56 pm

Aftermath of the Texas CPS Raid

By: Houston Criminal Defense Attorney John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair

In the fall of 2003 members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (“FLDS”) arrived in Eldorado, Texas. They purchased a 1700-acre ranch four miles outside of town. They called it the “Yearn for Zion Ranch” (“YFZ”). More members arrived. They constructed a mammoth temple and created their own community. They lived in peace.

While rumors circulated about in nearby Eldorado that the FLDS was a “polygamist cult” with older men taking multiple teenage girls as wives, there was no evidence of any criminal wrongdoing at the ranch. That is, until March 29, 2008 when a deranged African-American woman pretended to be a 16-year-old former FLDS resident twice impregnated by an older man and called a local domestic violence hotline saying she had been sexually and physically abused at the YFZ ranch. Women at the crisis center took this egregious false report to law enforcement, including the Texas Rangers, and the fires of one of the largest and most costly religious witch-hunts in Texas history were lit. There was no controlling the massive law enforcement and child protective services stampede that ensued.

Five days after the Rosita Swinton false report to the domestic violence hotline, the Texas Rangers and local law enforcement agencies, supported by Texas Child Protective Services (“CPS”), launched a massive, military-style raid on the YFZ compound. They threatened and generally terrorized the approximately 700 people living at the ranch, including more than 400 children. They conducted searches of all the buildings on the compound, including the temple. They seized documents and arrested people—all without any reasonable probable cause.

But worst of all, CPS seized and removed 439 FLDS children from the lawful custody of their parents. CPS had no legitimate cause, and certainly no legal authority, to sever the cherished child-parent relationship. While a local judge, apparently influenced by local politics and a mindset similar to CPS workers, held that the removal of the children was legal, she was quickly reversed by a state appeals court that pointed out just how flagrantly she had violated Texas family law. (more…)

March 15, 2009

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT:

Filed under: Death Penalty Crimes Lawyer — Tags: , , , — johntfloyd @ 1:45 pm

AN INDICTMENT BY A DEATH ROW SURVIVOR

By: Billy Sinclair

I am pleased to announce, through the website of the John T. Floyd Law Firm, that my wife, Jodie, and I have recently released our second book, Capital Punishment: An Indictment by a Death Row Survivor. Released by the prestigious publishing house Arcade Publishing (New York), Capital Punishment is a collection of fourteen essays that examines the entire spectrum of the subject of the death penalty: its methods of executions, its Southern regional phenomenon, its racism, its tortuous botched executions, and its impact on our society.

Capital Punishment is not an academic study. The death penalty is told through the human drama it inevitably creates: the persons put to death, those put them to death, and those who tried to stop it. When Jodie and I decided to write my prison memoir, A Life in the Balance: The Billy Wayne Sinclair Story (Arcade Publishing, New York 2000), we did so with one overriding objective—to tell as honestly and realistically as possible the story of one man’s struggle to survive inside one of the nation’s most brutal and violent prisons, the Louisiana State Penitentiary. We would like to believe that we were true to that literary objective. The media critics thought we were as the following book reviews suggest:

Associated Press – “A hopeful tale of an unbreakable human spirit.”

New York Times Book Review – “A numbing tale of crime, punishment, and redemption.

Boston Globe – “Well researched, persuasive, and morbidly compelling … Sinclair’s firsthand account of life in prison offers an authentic, sometimes grisly narrative.”

New Orleans Times-Picayune – “What Sinclair’s book does most eloquently is to tell us how little we know about justice.’

Loyola New Orleans Magazine – “Louisiana’s corrupt prison system, sex, violence, and a mismatched love story unfold in the nonstop, gut-wrenching pages of … a seamless narrative.”

Publishers’ Weekly – “A powerful tale, and readers will be shaken by the sorrow, greed, and corruption they encounter in it.”

But we approached the writing of Capital Punishment with a completely different literary objective. We had an obvious biased objective from the outset. We tell the reader as much in the “Preface” of the book. We both strenuously oppose the death penalty, and as individuals and authors, we have often spoken out against it and published written opposition to it. But first and foremost we are journalists. Jodie earned a master degree in journalism from the prestigious Columbia University School of Journalism and was an award-winning television journalist for many years who witnessed the execution of Gary Lockhart in Huntsville in 1997. I was the recipient of the highly acclaimed George Polk and Sidney Hillman journalism awards writing about death penalty as co-editor of the THE ANGOLITE, the newsmagazine of the Louisiana State Penitentiary. (more…)

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