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11 November 2004
Chron eye for the death row killer guy - cont'd
We missed pointing out the latest installment of Chron Eye for the Death Row Killer Guy on Monday.
It departed slightly from Jeff Cohen's tried and true formula since it didn't feature a gratuitous reference to HPD and/or the crime lab.
Juan Lezon is surely not going to move up the Chron hierarchy if he doesn't get with the Cohen program on death row advocacy journalism!
Two more executions are scheduled for next week, so maybe Lezon will have another shot at it.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ death row killer guy - cont'd"> 11/11/04 12:11 AM | Houston Chronicle | Technorati | Comments (0)
17 November 2004
Chron eye for the death row killer guy - cont'd
On Monday, it seemed Roma Khanna had let Jeff Cohen down.
In that installment of the Chron Eye for the Death Row Killer Guy, Khanna departed slightly from the Chron Eye formula, neglecting to mention redeeming prison activities of the death row killer (like poetry or knitting) and also neglecting any reference to HPD or the crime lab, while actually devoting column space to the victim.
However, Khanna rebounded strongly today (the death row killer guy is scheduled to be executed tonight), as lawyers brought out the kitchen sink in an effort to save the death row killer guy:
An attorney representing a Houston man scheduled to be executed today argued Tuesday his life should be spared because of problems with the police work and prosecution in the case.
Anthony Guy Fuentes, 30, is scheduled to receive a lethal injection this evening for the shooting death of Robert Pres-ton Tate, 28, after a robbery of a convenience store on Feb. 18, 1994. Fuentes admits he participated in the robbery but maintains he did not kill Tate.
An appeal filed Monday notes discrepancies in the testimony of eyewitnesses and argues that Houston police officers improperly questioned witnesses. Defense attorneys also argued that Harris County prosecutors knowingly allowed a witness to give false testimony and withheld information that would have allowed defense attorneys to expose inconsistencies.
"You have all of these witnesses who witness the same event, and they are all seeing different things — some of them are dramatically different," said Jim Marcus, executive director of the Texas Defender Service and one of Fuentes' lawyers. "There are so many problems with the eyewitness testimony, and the case really hangs on putting the right gun in Fuentes' hands."
Chronicle editor Jeff Cohen's wife, Kathryn Kase, is a prominent member of the Texas Defender Service.
Maybe that explains the journalistic resources devoted to the Chron Eye for the Death Row Killer Guy, even as entire sections are dropped and staff is laid off.
(Update) Anne Linehan calls my attention to the fact that the Texas Defender Service's website links to a recent Chronicle series, A Deadly Distinction, on Harris County as the "pipeline to death row" in Texas. How convenient!
(Update 2) This particular Death Row Killer Guy is no longer with us.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ death row killer guy - cont'd"> 11/17/04 08:21 PM | Houston Chronicle | Technorati | Comments (0)
05 November 2009
Return of the Chron eye
AFTER THE MASSIVE LAYOFFS at the Chronicle this spring, some of the pet projects of the newspaper (or at least the newspaper's editor and his wife) were curtailed: the Chron Eye for the Death Row Killer Guy has appeared much less frequently.
Today, though, the Chron's arts columnist (and editorial board member) took up the old cause with a special "arts" edition of the Chron Eye. Nevertheless, the death-row killer guy departed this world earlier tonight.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/05/09 08:54 PM | General | Technorati | Comments (0)
28 March 2006
A new Chron eye
There is a new Chron Eye for the Death Row Killer Guy.
This one isn't as horrible as some, but it's really not clear why the newspaper devoted so much column space to the story of Death Row Killer Guy Kevin Kincy.
It's also not clear why he is referred to as "Kinsy" at one point in the story.
Those layers of editors and fact-checkers must have missed that one.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 03/28/06 04:35 PM | Houston Chronicle | Technorati | Comments (1)
11 September 2006
Best Chron Eye of 2006?
Matt Bramanti was the first to alert us today to a new Chron Eye for the Death Row Killer Guy, the latest installment of the local Hearst daily's semi-regular effort to redeem death row killers awaiting execution.
The typical Chron Eye formula, readers may recall, has three parts: 1) reporter points out some "redeeming" quality of the death row killer guy; 2) reporter points out some bad aspect of the death row killer guy's childhood; and 3) reporter calls into question some aspect of the justice system's treatment of the death row killer guy (with a bonus if the HPD crime lab or Chron "bad guy" Chuck Rosenthal can somehow be criticized).
Today's Chron Eye goes for the hat trick. Here's the "redeeming" quality:
"I live every day with what happened, and I regret what happened," he said. "How much remorse does society want me to show?"
Hmm, three brutal murders involving beatings with a meat hammer? Just a guess, but I'm thinking society feels like a lethal injection is just about right.
Here's the childhood angle:
Matchett was raised early on by his paternal grandparents in the East Texas town of Madisonville. His teenage mother lived in nearby Midway, and he rarely saw his father. After his mother, Annie Robinson, married, Matchett went to live with her in Grand Prairie near Dallas.
At 13, Matchett began to hang out on the streets and run errands for drug dealers and prostitutes. The bottom really fell out of his life when his 11-year-old sister was raped. Matchett said he blamed himself for not being around to protect her.
"It was the worst time of my life," Matchett said.
And finally, the reporter questions the criminal justice system:
Roy E. Greenwood, an Austin lawyer appointed to represent Matchett in the Huntsville cases, said he remains puzzled about Matchett's guilty plea. He said Matchett should have been able to argue in court that he killed Anderson in self-defense, but was prohibited by the plea.
"Why he (Davis) pled him guilty and blew off all these legal issues never made sense to me," Greenwood said. "You just don't give up with plea of guilty."
Matchett, whose federal and state appeals all were denied, also faulted his trial attorneys for not presenting mitigating evidence for jurors to consider a lesser punishment. He also claimed that court-appointed appellate attorneys botched his appeals.
There's an added celebrity bonus in this Chron Eye:
Anti-death penalty groups and activists, including French actress Bridget Bardot, have latched onto Matchett's case.
French actress? THAT is world class!
This death row killer guy is scheduled for departure from the living on Tuesday.
Thanks to Rosanna Ruiz for a top-notch edition of the Chron Eye for the Death Row Killer guy. That is probably the best one so far in 2006!
BLOGVERSATION: TBIFOC.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 09/11/06 09:46 PM | Houston Chronicle | Technorati | Comments (4)
15 November 2005
Return of the Chron Eye
We thought perhaps the Chron Eye for the Death Row Killer Guy, the anti-death-penalty newspaper's series of apologia for death-row killers, had been retired (much like the silly Editorial LiveJournals seem to have been retired).
There was the reverse Chron eye last week, to add to the suspicion.
There has been the recent tendency simply to run AP coverage of executions in Texas.
And there was this AP coverage of death row killer guy Robert Dale Rowell, posted to Chron.com yesterday.
That's why we were surprised to see today's Chron Eye by Rosanna Ruiz.
She sounds a little sad that she doesn't have much to work with, as Chron Eyes go:
Unlike many of his fellow inmates on death row, Robert Dale Rowell never got much television airtime or received much newspaper ink.
The 50-year-old will walk into Texas' death chamber tonight a virtual unknown, the 18th inmate to be put to death this year.
No public campaign has been waged on his behalf. The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty issued a routine alert on Rowell's execution that does little more than lay out the facts of his case.
A last-minute reprieve is unlikely. His lawyers are not claiming he is mentally retarded or that his trial attorney fell asleep in court. His appeals were exhausted last month when the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to review his case or his claim that the trial judge should have given the jury better instructions.
"There is nothing now pending," Rowell's attorney Ed Mallett said Monday.
The trial was not even one to stand out for Kelly Siegler, the Harris County assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case in 1994.
So, this one was so cut-and-dried that even the usual suspects couldn't get worked up about it.
But given her shot at writing a Chron Eye, Rosanna Ruiz gives it a strong effort:
Eleven years later, Mallett describes his client as a "reasonably literate, very nice person."
"He has a history of being violent when confronted and under the influence of drugs. All of his offenses are drug-related," Mallett said. "He's aware he has an extreme susceptibility to addiction and that he cannot control it when it's available to him."
Rowell earned his GED and associate's degree in prison.
In court records, Randy Rowell explained that he and his brother had to be more independent as children because their mother had been on medication most of her life. Randy Rowell did not return a phone call seeking comment for this article.
"The whole neighborhood did drugs and once you do them, you always want them," Robert Rowell is quoted in a 1998 report after a psychological evaluation. "Before I did drugs, I stayed with my grandfather and fished and I was happy."
See, he wasn't so bad. Not for a guy with a bad mother. And he liked to fish! Life just sort of got away from him, and made him kill those people.
And that's today's Chron Eye.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 11/15/05 02:32 PM | Houston Chronicle | Technorati | Comments (2)
04 May 2006
No staff Chron Eye for this death row killer guy
The Chronicle declined to use its own staff to report on Jackie Barron Wilson, who was executed in Huntsville today. Instead of the sympathetic portrayal of a killer that we've come to expect from the Chron Eye for the Death Row Killer Guy, the newspaper ran AP coverage.
Perhaps it was just too hard to portray this guy sympathetically:
A former laborer was executed tonight for the 1988 rape and murder of a 5-year-old North Texas girl.
[snip]
[Jackie Barron] Wilson was condemned for the slaying of Lottie Margaret Rhodes, known by the nickname "Maggie." After breaking into her bedroom, he kidnapped Maggie from her Arlington apartment in the early morning hours of Nov. 30, 1988, then sexually assaulted the little girl before killing her.
Authorities said Wilson, who lived in nearby Irving, strangled Maggie before running over her with a car.
Maggie's battered body was found about five miles from her home a few hours after she was kidnapped. She was face down in a muddy ditch next to a rural road in Grand Prairie.
Running AP coverage instead of a full-blown Chron Eye was a good call.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ death row killer guy"> 05/04/06 09:33 PM | Houston Chronicle | Technorati | Comments (1)
07 November 2004
Chron eye for the death row killer guy - cont'd
It's time for another installment of Chron Eye for the Death Row Killer Guy.
For a while now, we've been noticing that the anti-death-penalty Chronicle has a tendency sympathetically to cover death row killers about to be executed.
The usual formula is along the lines of pointing out some nice quality of the killer (for example, keeping poetry in prison), some bad quality of his childhood (perceived or real), and the problems at HPD and its crime lab (whether relevant or not to the killer being discussed).
Posted by Kevin Whited @ death row killer guy - cont'd"> 11/07/04 09:55 PM | Houston Chronicle | Technorati | Comments (0)
04 June 2005
Return of the Chron Eye!
Several readers have emailed to make sure we didn't miss today's return of the Chron Eye For The Death Row Killer Guy.
The Chron Eye is the newspaper's recurring effort to portray death-row killers sympathetically. Here's a quick refresher on the Chron Eye formula:
The usual formula is along the lines of pointing out some nice quality of the killer (for example, keeping poetry in prison), some bad quality of his childhood (perceived or real), and the problems at HPD and its crime lab (whether relevant or not to the killer being discussed).
Today's Chron Eye arguably only hits one of the three, unless one wants to count the death row killer guy's tattoos as a "nice quality" (and Chronicle writer Allan Turner does seem strangely enamored):
The blue prison tattoos on Alex Martinez's arms and torso, as intense in imagery as anything on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, tell the story of his life. Somewhere, surely, are references to his wretched childhood, the endless beatings and psychological abuse.
But it's the tombstones, macabre tributes to the women whose throats he slashed, that are most chilling.
"Maria," reads one, referring to Maria Martinez, the stepmother who miraculously survived his brutal attack in August 2001. "To be continued."
The second cuts to the heart of what brought the 28-year-old one-time Houston fast-food worker to death row. Beneath the inscription, "RIP," are a date, a woman's name and the sum, "$300." Seemingly cryptic, the tattoo is a crude ink-and-skin memorial to South Houston prostitute Helen Joyce Oliveros, who, on Aug. 12, 2001, was murdered by Martinez during a squabble over her fee.
Nice guy. Note also the author's assumptions in the lede of a wretched childhood that included abuse, something actually not established (and perhaps contradicted) in the story later:
Martinez's adoptive mother, Velma Griffin, who raised the child from 15 months to nine years, when her marriage ended in divorce, denied all the abuse allegations. Today, she prays for him and hopes his life will be spared. She routinely attempts to visit him on death row, though on each occasion he has rebuffed her, silently returning to his cell when he determines the identity of his visitor.
"I feel very sad," she said. "I cry all the way home. I have to sit in the car five to 10 minutes to compose myself. I just wanted him to know that somebody loves him."
Griffin said Martinez's early years showed promise — as a Boy Scout he was selected to address the Texas Senate. But after the divorce, when she gave up custody of her four children to her ex-husband, "his life just fell apart."
Martinez said the situation hardly improved when his adoptive father remarried. His stepmother, he asserted, intensely disliked him and worked to alienate his father.
"She wouldn't do anything," he said. "She'd wait until my dad came home, and he'd hit me hard."
Martinez's father, stepmother and siblings could not be located for comment.
By the time Martinez dropped out of the ninth grade, he was a steady inhaler of spray paint fumes and similar substances. His adolescence and young adulthood were marked by continual violent skirmishes — only during three years was he free of the criminal-justice system, records show.
"I always looked at it like everybody owed me something," Martinez said. "My mentality was not giving a damn. I couldn't see myself in the world for some reason. I was mad all the time. ... I always thought that I could go right someday. I always thought that things would work out for the best. And all the time I was getting further in the hole."
It sounds like this Death Row Killer Guy seems to be acknowledging his own part in going astray. But that sort of acknowledgment just doesn't fit the Chron Eye "childhood victim" formula, and is buried.
Although the HPD crime lab wasn't involved in this story, there is the obligatory reference to the potential unfairness of it all:
Partly out of fear that he will kill again, partly out of dread of spending his life behind bars, Martinez said in a recent death row interview that he wants to die. To the consternation of his appeals attorney, Houston lawyer Pat McCann, the killer has insisted that all efforts to save his life be halted.
"I think Alexander's life still has value," he said. "I wish he would change his mind."
McCann thinks a key element of the prosecution's case — testimony by his client's Harris County cellmate, Cesar Rios — is faulty.
"This is a case that never should have been a capital case to start with," McCann said. "A lying jailhouse snitch was one of the key elements in making a murder case a capital case. ... If Alexander dies, he'd be dying for a lie. That's not justice."
[snip]
Martinez, in the death row interview, affirmed that he likely would kill again.
It's hard to get that worked up over it. One wonders why so much column space was wasted on this.
We thought Mr. Kathryn Kase's newspaper had abandoned the Chron Eye series, since it's mainly been running AP coverage of death row killer guys about to meet their end lately. Although the series is kind of fun for us -- sort of like Chris Baker's "Debris Game" -- we'd just as soon see it go away.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 06/04/05 05:55 PM | Houston Chronicle | Technorati | Comments (3)
03 January 2005
Chron eye for the death row killer guy - cont'd
We got a little nervous there for a while, but the Chronicle didn't disappoint.
The paper came through today with the latest installment of Chron Eye for the Death Row Killer Guy.
Now, they did something unusual, in that they ran AP copy rather than putting one of their own reporters on it.
However, the AP reporter (inadvertently) did such a fine job adhering to the Chron Eye formula that apparently a Chron writeup wasn't necessary.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ death row killer guy - cont'd"> 01/03/05 11:17 PM | Houston Chronicle | Technorati | Comments (1)
15 February 2006
A new Chron Eye: Clyde Smith Jr.
Another convicted murderer is headed to the Texas death chamber today, and that means it's time for another edition of Chron Eye for the Death Row Killer Guy, in which journalistic ethics the political preferences of editor Jeff Cohen and wife Kathryn Kase concerns of journalistic balance dictate sympathetic portrayals of death-row killer guys.
Today, we learn that the latest death row killer guy had a troubled childhood, a favorite theme when the reporter is unable to find any real redeeming qualities of the death row killer (such as, for example, composition of poetry in prison):
No one from Smith's family will attend. He won't let them.
"He divorced me and he denied me, and I don't have no child, it look like," said his mother, Ruth Maye, who never visited her son in prison.
Maye said she and other family members in Mississippi had planned to go to the execution to see Smith "one last time," and claim his body — which he signed away to an unnamed friend.
Smith, who ran away at age 15, told police he would rather be in jail than in his mother's house.
Maye said she was a good mother to a stubborn child who wouldn't listen to her and got in with the wrong crowd.
"I don't know what happened to him," Maye said.
But according to affidavits filed by some of Smith's five siblings — only two of whom had the same father — Smith, who was no stranger to drugs and alcohol, ran away to escape excessive beatings by both his mother and the five men she married and divorced as they were growing up.
Didn't stay put for long
After spending time on the streets and at a boy's home, Smith moved back to Houston, where he had lived until he was 9, to live with his father, Clyde Smith. His mother warned him that "there ain't nothing left in Texas but death."
Smith's father turned him away, and Jacobs and Bilton were killed about a year later. Smith was 18 years old at the time. The men were only two of the 86 taxicab and livery drivers murdered while on the job nationwide in 1992.
In the 1980s, 15.1 of every 100,000 taxicab drivers lost their lives to murder. Though the murder rate has dropped since the mid-1990s, when cabs were first equipped with emergency alarms and cameras and could be tracked throughout their city routes, a 2000 report by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration revealed that cabdrivers are still 60 times more likely than other workers to be slain on the job.
Smith now says he was only an accessory to the murders and that others pulled the trigger. The three confessions he recorded upon his arrest, he says, were made under pressure from homicide investigators.
Points to violent childhood
While Smith's appellate lawyer does not deny his involvement in the killings, he says his life could have been spared had his trial attorney presented evidence regarding Smith's violent childhood to the jury that sentenced him to death.
"The literature sort of shows that that stuff is important to jurors," attorney F. Clinton Broden said.
"Whether it would've made a difference in this case, I don't know. But he should have had the chance."
In a sworn statement, his trial lawyer said he conducted a complete investigation and found no evidence of any abuse.
But Smith's lawyers have claimed in a string of failed appeals that the trial lawyer's investigation was scant, his client visits infrequent and that he never explained to Smith that his childhood could have helped save his life.
The state rejected Smith's first and most critical appeal, his postconviction writ of habeas corpus, in part because his court-appointed habeas lawyers did not include any evidence that family members would have testified to Smith's history had they been contacted.
By the time Broden obtained that evidence and filed new appeals, it was essentially too late, as higher courts cannot rule on evidence that could have been presented at the state level.
'I did not put you there'
But Assistant District Attorney Lynn Hardaway said it is "highly unlikely" that evidence about his childhood would have spared Smith the death sentence, in light of the overwhelming evidence presented against him.
In contrast, here is the AP's coverage of that aspect of the story (via KHOU-11), which seems sufficient:
In earlier appeals, lawyers pointed out federal judges agreed Smith may have had poor legal help during his trial and that he suffered significant abuse as a child, which they say was not pursued by his trial defense team.
“Nevertheless, ... courts concluded that Smith must shoulder the consequences,” Clint Broden, Smith’s appeals lawyers, said.
[snip]
Smith dropped out of the ninth grade in Laurel, Miss. and once worked as a security guard.
He has four brothers and a sister. From death row, he said the last time he saw a relative was 1991.
He also has a daughter, about 18, who has no contact with him.
“I didn’t want her to be exposed to this,” he said.
Death row killer guy Clyde Smith Jr. will be departing tonight.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 02/15/06 02:33 PM | Houston Chronicle | Technorati | Comments (1)
14 April 2005
Chron eye for the death row killer guy - variation on a theme
Eric Berger pens a variation on the ever popular Chron eye for the death row killer guy theme today, reporting on a study that suggests death row prisoners may experience pain in some circumstances when put to death by lethal injection.
In the interest of equal time, we suggest that Eric Berger next be assigned to troll for studies related to the following:
1) Pain experienced by disabled persons when their feeding tubes are forcibly removed
2) Pain experienced by victims of violent crimes at hands of Death Row Killer Guys (rape, murder, torture and the like).
We're sure Chronicle editor Jeff Cohen will get right on those stories.
UPDATE (5:43 PM): Google News searching on Dr. Koniarias, one of the authors of the study and who is quoted in the story, turns up an interesting selection of how this story has been treated thus far by major media. The first news source (as captured by Google News) to run the story was the Common Dreams Progressive News Wire, which picked up a press release from the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty yesterday. Other U.S. media outlets have picked up various versions of the story. ABC News is running the Reuters version in its health section. Ditto MSNBC. Forbes runs a version in its health section. Ditto the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The Washington Times posted a version of the story as part of its UPI wire service.
It seems that not many news editors were attuned enough to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty to devote staff to producing their own version of this story for today's edition, let alone put it on the front page. But then again, that's why we call it the Chron Eye, as opposed to, say, the Dallas Morning News Eye.
UPDATE 2: James Taranto's Best of the Web weighs in with this little blurb:
Problem Solved
"U.S. Executions by Lethal Injection May Not Be Humane"--headline, HealthDay News, April 14
"Experts Say Ending Feeding Can Lead to a Gentle Death"--headline, New York Times, March 20
I doubt Mr. and Mrs. Kathryn Kase are amused.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ death row killer guy - variation on a theme"> 04/14/05 10:29 AM | Houston Chronicle | Technorati | Comments (12)
28 February 2006
Friedman testifies for (twice) convicted murderer
Kinky Friedman's foray into alternative marketing political campaign took an odd turn today, as Friedman testified in the sentencing phase of the trial of (twice) convicted murderer Max Soffar:
Prosecutor Lyn McClellan objected throughout the 10-minute testimony.
McClellan said Friedman's participation in the trial was nothing but a publicity stunt. He said Friedman did not offer any mitigating evidence to the trial that would explain to jurors Soffar's behavior.Friedman, who wrote to Soffar while he was on death row, has said he believes that Soffar is innocent and has been wrongly convicted.
"I said he had a higher innocence. He had an earned innocence, an achieved innocence like a guy who comes back from Iraq or Vietnam -- from a war. He's struggled with his demons and he's conquered them," Friedman said.
Once his political campaign flames out, Friedman should apply for a gig writing the Chron Eye For The Death Row Killer Guy!
Friedman said he met Soffar while writing an article for Texas Monthly magazine. He interviewed Soffar and exchanged letters with him during his years on death row.
Although he used to support the death penalty, Friedman told jurors he's now against it.
Perhaps the Chronicle reporting tomorrow will let us know whether Kathryn Kase, defense attorney and wife of Chronicle editor Jeff Cohen, wept over Friedman's testimony.
ADDITIONAL COVERAGE: KHOU-11.
UPDATE (03-01-2006): Here is the Chronicle's coverage.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 02/28/06 08:23 PM | Houston Miscellany | Technorati | Comments (2)
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