[DP-announce] Fwd: News: James Byrd murder in Jasper, TX; the failure of the legislature in TX

[Marie des Neiges Leonard]

May 31


TEXAS:

5 years later, Jasper still coming to grips with Byrd killing


Unav Wade scoffs at the talk of Jasper's healing and reconciliation in the
5 years since James Byrd Jr. was dragged to death for being black.

Don't get her wrong, Wade says she enjoys life in this racially balanced
city of about 8,300 tucked in the woods of East Texas. It's just that she
believes Jasper's black-and-white divide hasn't narrowed much.

"I do have some really nice white friends here, I do. It's not many, but
they love me and I know it," Wade said. "But the ones who are not so nice,
I don't think they've changed."

Three of the not-so-nice ones are in prison, one for life and the others
awaiting the executioner's needle for chaining Byrd's ankles to a gray
1982 Ford pickup truck bumper in the early morning hours of June 7, 1998,
and dragging him to pieces along rural Huff Creek Road.

Had Byrd's remains been strewn through a white neighborhood and not in the
predominantly black area where it happened, Wade believes his killers
might not be behind bars today.

"They'd have covered it up and we'd have never known," said the
72-year-old Wade, revealing an honest cynicism born of a cross burned in
her yard near Mobile, Ala., in the 1950s, followed by a move into a
"wasp's nest" of bigotry in Alameda, Calif., in the 1960s.

Wade isn't impressed by outward signs of racial healing, such as the
Jasper park that now bears Byrd's name and the 1999 removal of an iron
fence that segregated the area's 166-year-old cemetery.

"There are no black people buried on that (white) side that I know about,"
she said. "It's still separated."

Still, Wade doesn't report enduring any bold-faced hate in her 30-odd
years in Jasper. The same cannot be said for James Byrd Jr.

In 27 years as a Texas state trooper, Billy Rowles had seen his share of
auto-pedestrian collisions. 6 months into his 1st term as Jasper County's
sheriff, Rowles figured he'd be investigating another one the morning of
June 7 when he was called back from a weekend getaway. "At first I thought
he got hit by a car and got hung up underneath it," Rowles recalled. "It
still appeared that way until we started walking the 3.1 miles. Probably a
mile into that walk it became real apparent it wasn't a hit-and-run."

The blood stains marking Byrd's path weaved side to side, sometimes into
the grass off the road. There were no tire tracks in the grass, meaning
the vehicle stayed on the pavement.

Rowles began to envision a man bound at the feet when he saw the gouge
marks above Byrd's ankles: "With no tracks on the left side of the road
and none on the right, things just started calculating. The old heart
started racing. Something ain't right."

Things fell together quickly that Sunday. A boy reported to Jasper police
he had seen Byrd riding with three whites early that morning.
Investigators found a tool with the initials "SB" and a lighter with the
word "Possum." Then they found drag marks and evidence of a scuffle on a
dirt logging path leading onto the road.

So Rowles had a "pretty good clue what happened," but still didn't know
why. When his men suggested local troublemaker Shawn Berry drove a primer
gray pickup matching the boy's description, they made the first arrest and
learned the answer.

"When it really struck me was when (Berry) broke and confessed about it.
He said they went to 'F' with an 'N,'" Rowles said, editing the hateful
expletives himself. "That just echoed in my head for the next 5 years.
That's when we realized what we had."

Word of the killing spread, spawning fear in the black community. Houston
schoolteacher Clara Taylor had been in Jasper that Saturday visiting
brother James Byrd Jr. and the rest of her family at a wedding shower.

She got the call shortly after noon Sunday that he was dead.

"We thought mostly it might be a robbery or some other kind of foul play,"
Taylor said. A lynching "never crossed my mind."

Byrd, 49, was widely portrayed afterward as a heavy drinker whose judgment
might have been impaired that night by too much alcohol. While that could
be true, Taylor said there's another side of her brother that outsiders
didn't get to know.

"He was a talker, a very smooth talker at times. He was a very good
singer, an accomplished piano player and a trumpet player. He had a voice
like Al Green - to me he sounded even better than Al Green.

"The personal problems he was dealing with, those were his problems. They
never hurt anyone else."

By Monday evening an appalled nation was learning about the grisliest hate
crime in recent memory. Meanwhile, Berry and friends John William "Possum"
King and Lawrence Russell Brewer - all with nonviolent criminal records -
were in the Jasper County jail charged with capital murder.

Then, more questions. Would Rowles and District Attorney Guy James Gray -
both white - vigorously pursue Berry, King and Brewer, or would Jasper try
to sweep the ugliness under the rug as had happened across the South so
many times before? And could prosecutors convince juries that the men
committed a second felony, kidnapping, along with murder to qualify for
the death penalty under Texas law?

Taylor, unlike Wade, was confident justice would be served all along.

"We were very trusting," Taylor said. "I think because (authorities) were
so open with us and straightforward - they came to our home and talked to
us - that's why we had so much confidence in them."

Rowles said justice was colorblind.

"Everybody thinks we prosecuted a hate crime," he said. "In our opinion we
were just prosecuting a real bad murder. We did nothing on this because of
race. This was a bad case and we worked it from Day One as hard as we
could. We were prosecuting a terrible murder that turned out to be a hate
crime."

Gray acknowledges the skepticism among his peers that he would be
successful.

"In the first few months of this thing, the older members of the law
enforcement establishment and the older members of the bar were saying
this can't be done," Gray said, referring to the prosecution of three
whites for killing a black man. "I think we broke a mold there."

Walter Diggles, head of the Deep East Texas Council of Governments, whose
job is to attract economic development to this historically depressed
region, was among the black community leaders calling for calm in the
days, weeks and months following the slaying, which included 2 New Black
Panther marches, one coinciding with a Ku Klux Klan rally.

Townsfolk mostly stayed out of the mix and allowed the outsider radicals
to make their points and, more importantly, leave town.

"It was so important for the law enforcement officials to make some very
fast decisions about how this case was going to be handled," Diggles said.
"They made those quick decisions very well, very openly. They said, 'This
is what it looks like and we're going to open it to the world.'"

Gray, now in private practice, convinced three different juries that
Berry, King and Brewer kidnapped and killed Byrd and were guilty of
capital murder. They condemned King and Brewer, both of whom were racist
prison gang members.

To this day Berry, 28, sticks by his original statement that he had
"nothing to do with it whatsoever" and that King, 29, and Brewer, 36, were
the real killers. The Jasper County jury didn't buy it and came within two
votes of reuniting him with his buddies on death row. Instead, Berry will
be eligible for parole in 2038.

Even though Gray and Rowles believe Berry was driving the truck when Byrd
was dragged - Berry claims it was King - Gray says Berry had a chance to
help himself by helping authorities.

"If he had come forward before he was handcuffed he would have had a lot
of bargaining points," Gray said. "But until we got DNA results we did not
have a case I was comfortable with. There was a month in there that Shawn
Berry could have worked out a lot better deal than what the jury gave
him."

Appeals courts already have upheld all 3 convictions and sentences.
Rowles, who will retire after completing his 2nd term next year, and Gray,
who is considering a run for the Court of Criminal Appeals, agreed
ringleader King likely will be the first white man in Texas executed for
killing a black since 1854, according to the best records available.

"I think he's on a fast track," Gray said, noting King has been
uncooperative in his appeals even though he continues to deny he was even
there that night. In a 2001 interview with The Associated Press, King said
he was convicted for what he believes, not what he did.

"I'm proud to be white," he said. "And if they're going to kill me because
of that, so be it. I'm not going to denounce my beliefs and be subjugated
by society."

Through all the havoc and pain and unwanted publicity - a Showtime movie
premiering June 8 that depicts the crime promises to reopen old wounds -
Unav Wade says she's content to keep operating a beauty shop in her
adopted hometown.

"I still say in spite of all that's happened, I wouldn't live no where
else but Jasper," she said.

(source: Associated Press)

***********

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES -- Legislature failed to make needed death penalty
reforms


The majority of Texans support the death penalty. But no reasonable person
would support executing the innocent. That is why there cause for concern
over a number of aspects of this state's death penalty laws.

Yet the waning legislative session appears sadly to be on the verge of a
number of missed opportunities for reform. Even death penalty proponents
should regret the squandered opportunities, for, in some cases, they could
mean the execution of innocents, which taints the whole system. And in
some cases, if the innocent are executed, that likely means the guilty go
free.

One of the pieces of legislation still in play, but also still in doubt,
is Senate Bill 1224, sponsored by state Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston.

It would help to improve the accuracy of convictions and sentencing by
improving the competence of attorneys appointed in capital cases.

A recent report, entitled "Fatal Indifference" and released by the Texas
Defender Service, concluded that Texas' post-conviction (habeas corpus)
death-penalty appeals process is a "fatal combination of incompetent
attorneys and unaccountable courts."

TDS studied 251 Texas habeas cases filed since 1995. Among the
conclusions: death row inmates face a one in three chance of being
executed without having the case properly investigated by a competent
attorney and without having any claims of innocence or unfairness
presented or heard; numerous cases were cited in which appointed lawyers
either filed the wrong kind of claims, failed to support claims or copied
verbatim claims that were previously raised.

The Court of Criminal Appeals, the report also contends, is often
confronted with persuasive evidence of inadequately investigated and
poorly prepared state habeas petitions, but fails to act, despite the
Legislature's statutory "guarantee" of competent counsel.

SB 1224 would help to address many of these problems, but a House version
of the bill would "perpetuate the embarrassment," according to an analysis
by the Equal Justice Center in Austin.

The two versions are bottled up in a conference committee, and it appears
increasingly unlikely that the better Senate version legislation will pass
before the legislative session ends June 2.

Other already missed reform opportunities this session include:

The Senate earlier killed a bill that would have given jurors in capital
murder cases the option of sentencing a convicted murderer to life without
the possibility of parole. In doing so, the Legislature lost a chance to
provide Texas juries with a needed alternative to the finality of the
death penalty and the relatively short punishment of a life sentence under
current Texas law, which offers the possibility of parole after 40 years.

Nearly a year after the U.S. Supreme Court banned execution of the
mentally retarded, Texas officials have no idea how many of the almost 450
convicts on death row have the disability and no system in place to ensure
that retarded inmates will not be put to death. In fact, Gov. Rick Perry
remains in denial, insisting that Texas does not execute the retarded,
even while, right under his nose, at least a dozen inmates have been
granted stays while the courts pursue their retardation claims.
Legislation to address these problems also apparently has fallen by the
political wayside.

Republican leaders in the House -- and in the governor's mansion -- who
have helped to thwart these needed reforms will no doubt proudly tout how
they've upheld Texas law and order. In fact, what they've done is thwart
Texas justice and undermined constitutional law and order.

(source: Editorial, Houston Chronicle, May 30)








---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://philebus.tamu.edu/pipermail/dp-announce/attachments/20030601/f69bff36/attachment.htm