Memorial March for Troy Davis - Edinburgh - Friday 21st Oct

Hello friends. I apologise again for my recent lack of activity. Bear with me. I recently started university and, as you can imagine, it's made a significant impact on my life.

I just got wind that Edinburgh University's Amnesty International Society is holding a memorial march for Troy Davis this Friday (October 21st). They are meeting at West Parliament Square (opposite St. Giles Cathedral) at 4 pm. I plan to be there, and if anyone's in the area, I'm sure you'd be more than welcome to attend.
If I can, I'll get some pictures.

Texas Executes Lawrence Brewer

Lawrence Russell Brewer, 44, was executed last night in Texas for the hate crime murder of James Byrd Jr., in 1998.

Brewer, a white supremacist gang member, chained Byrd, a black man, to the back of a pickup truck and pulled him along a bumpy asphalt road to his death. 

When asked if he had any final words, Brewer replied: "No. I have no final statement." He was pronounced dead at 6:21pm. 

Alongside Brewer, John William King was also sent to death row. His conviction and death sentence are still under appeal. Shawn Berry was also convicted for the crime, and was sentenced to life in prison.

Georgia Executes Troy Davis

Last night, Troy Davis, 42, was executed in Georgia by lethal injection for the murder of a Savannah police officer 22 years ago.

Davis' execution was delayed by several hours when the Supreme Court reviewed but then declined to act on a petition for a stay of execution from his lawyers.

Davis, who has always claimed his innocence, was led into the death chamber shortly before 11pm. He was pronounced dead at 11:08. In his final statement, Davis told the family of the victim that they had the wrong man, saying:
"I did not kill your son, father, brother. All I can ask is that you look deeper into this case so you really can finally see the truth."
He also told his supporters and family to "keep the faith" and asked God to bless, and have mercy on, the souls of the prison personnel.

Troy Davis scheduled for execution tonight - take action!

Troy Davis, who is potentially innocent (see earlier posts for details) is scheduled to be executed in Georgia tonight. I wish I'd done more campaigning about this earlier but it's my first week at university and I'm a little overwhelmed. For what it's worth - every little helps, after all - you can sign a petition here asking for the execution to be stopped. You can sign it even if you're outside the US like me (click 'not in USA' in the 'state' section).

Fingers crossed. My prayers are with Davis tonight.

p.s. If you want to comment, please do so respectfully. This is a human life we're talking about, no matter what value you put on that. I'm sick of disrespectful comments. If you have something bad to say, say it somewhere else. 


- SM 

TX: Hank Skinner's Execution Scheduled for the 4th time

A new execution date of November 9th has been set for Texas death row inmate Henry 'Hank' Skinner. This is the 4th time that Skinner has been scheduled for execution, but still some DNA tests (which he claims will prove his innocence) have not been carried out.

Skinner was sentenced to death for the 1993 murders of his girlfriend Twila Busby and her two sons. He maintains that he could not have committed the crimes because he was unconscious during the murders after taking alcohol and drugs (toxicology tests indicated this). For over ten years, prosecutors and state courts have refused to allow blood, fingernail scrapings, and hair found at the crime scene to be tested. However, a new state law that allows increased access to post-conviction DNA testing could help Skinner to have the evidence finally tested. The execution date will make this more difficult. Furthermore, a federal court ruling on whether prosecutors must turn over DNA evidence for testing is still being awaited, and Skinner's lawyers believe that the setting of an execution date is a tactic designed to make it tougher for the court to adequately weigh the matter. 

At Skinner's trial, the prosecution presented DNA evidence showing Skinner's blood at the scene. An ex-girlfriend also told jurors that he confessed to her (she later recanted her testimony by the way). However, other available DNA evidence, including a rape kit, biological material from under Twila Busby's fingernails, sweat from a man's jacket resembling one that another potential suspect often wore, a bloody towel, and knives, have never even been tested. 

I don't know if Skinner is innocent. But to even consider carrying out such an irreversible punishment as execution before all the evidence has been tested is unthinkable. Surely, if the state is so certain that Skinner is guilty, it won't hurt to double-check. All this shying away from untested evidence suggests to me that they're worried what the results might be. So, like in the Todd Willingham case, is this another instance of Texas sweeping the ugly truths about the death penalty under the rug - that capital punishment is so precious that anything which might show death row inmates to be innocent must be ignored?

If Skinner is guilty, the untested DNA evidence should only further prove this. But there is chance that they might prove Skinner to be innocent, and until we know which one it is, executing the man is another example of the death penalty gambling with innocent lives.

TX Gov. Rick Perry to run for President

So.
I'll say before I write this, because people will no doubt point it out, I am not a US citizen. I live in the UK. I don't know everything about US politics. Just thought I'd get that out of the way before I start.

Okay. So Texas's governor, Rick Perry, is running for president. Perry, a republican, said it was 'time to get America working again'. This coming from a man who has allowed the executions of 234 people during his term - a man who, when faced with the very strong possibility of having executed an innocent man (Todd Willingham), did not search for truth and justice, but instead abused his power by impeding the Texas Forensic Science Commission's investigation into the case. Is that the kind of man who should be president?
Maybe before he gets America working, he should get Texas working. Abolishing the death penalty would be a good start. As if he would. In the meantime, he could at least find out the truth about the Willingham case rather than sweeping it under the rug.

Also, if you're interested in the Todd Willingham case, you can sign a petition asking Perry to acknowledge that Willingham was wrongfully executed by clicking here and filling out the bit. I unfortunately can't sign it because I don't live in America.

The Death Penalty and the UK: Why we REALLY don't need to reinstate capital punishment.

As you may know, I live in Scotland in the United Kingdom, and as someone who very recently turned 18 and so must worry about adult-things, I'm aware that things in the UK aren't all that great at the moment, with regards to the economy and such. It seems only natural that, in a time when things aren't going too well, people decide to make it worse. Hence, it's time for the campaign to reinstate the death penalty in the UK to gain steam.

I always say that people are entitled to their opinions on this matter (a privilege death penalty supporters don't often like to allow me...) and so I'm not saying that people are bad for trying to reinstate it. However, in my experience, most arguments in support of the death penalty - especially those held by a lot of people in the UK, where we haven't used the death penalty for so long that people have forgotten why we got rid of it in the first place - are ill-informed and badly thought through. In my experience from classroom debates, I've found it astonishingly easy to win debates on the subject (whether the opposition admits it or not) because their arguments are rooted in vengeance and hate which, in my experience, are never very good reasons for doing anything, much less the taking of another human being's life.

In this post, I will briefly discuss the current campaign for the death penalty's reinstatement in the UK, and will state my reasons for thinking it it a terrible idea.

So, in a nutshell, the UK government, in a bid to win back the public's love and affection, which isn't going to happen (assuming it had it in the first place), has decided to make the public feel like they have more power over their government than they actually do. We are now able to petition parliament over the internet about subjects of our choice. As if they'd actually listen to what grubby little commoners like us have to say, but that's another matter entirely. If the subject of a petition gets over 100,000 supporters then it has to be considered by the House of Commons for debate. So of course, the age-old debate about the death penalty has been dragged out of it's supposedly nailed-down coffin and is back in the public eye.

History lesson: the death penalty was abolished for all crimes in the UK in 1998. The last execution took place in 1964. One of the main reasons for the abolition of the death penalty in the UK was growing concern over the possibility that innocent people could be executed, after a number of miscarriages of justice, including the case of Timothy Evans. Evans was executed in 1950 for the murders of his wife and daughter, which were committed by his neighbour, John Christie, who was later discovered to be a serial killer. Evans was pardoned in 1966, only 15 years too late.

The problem is, people have forgotten why we abolished the death penalty in the first place. They say time heals all wounds - the terrible consequences which can come hand in hand with the death penalty have left people's minds, and now all that remains is a rose-tinted memory of the 'good old days' when murderers ended up dangling from Albert Pierrepoint's rope.

Now, I'm not saying that the current justice system in the UK is perfect (far from it, in fact). But is going back to a system which we rejected for being dangerously flawed really the best way to fix the problem? That's like using a piece of faulty equipment which yesterday sliced your hand off because you haven't got any betters ideas on how to do the job without it. We abolished the death penalty for a reason, a good reason. So while our justice system is in need of a little reform, bringing back a system which clearly didn't work is a huge leap in the entirely wrong direction.

Luckily, as I've already mentioned, I doubt very much that the e-petition will be very successful when presented to the House of Commons (I've no doubt, however, that it will get it's 100,000 signatures). The trouble is, though, that this is just the beginning. When you lop one head off a Hydra, two more grow to replace it. This debate is no more over than the UK's other problems.

In the meantime, if you are a UK resident like me, you can sign an e-petition urging the UK not to reinstate the death penalty at: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/1090

Here is what the campaign has to say for itself, and I agree with every word:

A petition to call on the government to retain its position regards the abolition of the Death Penalty for all offences. That the British people note that only 58 nations currently use capital punishment, as opposed to 95 which have abolished it, further notes the un-retractable nature of such a sentence in incidents of miscarriages of Justice, further notes the death penalty does not reduce crime or act as a deterrent and in US states which practice capital punishment incidents of homicide are higher than US states which do not, further notes the higher cost of capital punishment compared to life imprisonment, believes that British Justice should not be in the same league as China, Iran, North Korea, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Syria which do practice capital punishment on a routine basis and that the death penalty is the ultimate denial of human rights and an affront to the values of British Justice.

Apologies for our lack of activity

Hello everyone,

You've probably noticed that we haven't been posting much lately. That's partly due to severe computer difficulties on my end over the past few months, but mostly due to us being extremely busy. Tiffany is in full time education and I am heading for university in September. As such, we feel we are unable to maintain the level of commitment with which we were previously attending to this blog and other aspects of Death Watch; Stardoll.

I hope to be able to continue posting, though not as much as I previously did, and will return full-time when able to. We will both also continue to fight for this cause in our personal lives. Our views towards the death penalty have not changed. Now especially, as arguments for its reinstatement in the UK are gaining momentum, I will be fighting against it.

We're still fighting, but you might not hear as much from us.

-Samantha

UK bans export of lethal drugs; death penalty supporters call for firing squads



Does the firing squad have the eXecution-factor?





  As a British citizen, and one currently studying the death penalty in Higher RMPS, I know that not everyone in my country agrees with me about the death penalty: that we're better off without it in the UK, and that, as a nation which opposes the death penalty, we shouldn't be helping other countries carry out executions by exporting drugs for them to use in lethal injections. Many a debate in class boils down to someone getting angry and shouting that we should just shoot all our criminals and be done with it.

Death penalty supporters in the US apparently have the same opinion.

On Friday, the UK ban on the export of sodium thiopental and other lethal-injection drugs came into force. This, of course, is a set back for supporters of the death penalty in the US: how will they commit legalised murder now? Or is it a set back? Within hours of the ban coming into force, a leading death penalty advocate in California called for the reintroduction of the gas chamber, calling it the "obvious solution". To me, the obvious solution is, just off the top of my head, a nation-wide moratorium on executions, but that's just me.

It's not just one person though; in New York, a prominent law professor called for the widespread use of firing squads, saying that it is a form of capital punishment which "doesn't pretend to be something else." I agree that capital punishment shouldn't pretend to be something it isn't, but I believe that what it is is immoral and dangerous, putting innocent lives at risk without any hope of being able to rectify mistakes. And that applies to the firing squad too.

In the face of serious shortages of drugs used in lethal injections, some states have already adopted a new drug protocol and others are beginning the switch. But there's never going to be a perfect solution, whether we pump our criminals full of drugs, shoot 'em, gas 'em, or simply eliminate the technical stuff and throttle them ourselves on the courtroom floor. Surely this is evident in the century-spanning struggle to find a perfect method: the gas chamber replaced hanging, the electric chair replaced the gas chamber, lethal injection replaced the electric chair, and now we're trying to replace that is well. It just goes on and on and on, and we're never going to find that method which is just right because it's not the method that's the problem, it's the system as a whole. The death penalty is a flawed concept; it's not necessary.

So maybe instead of searching for the next big trend in prisoner-execution, we should be looking for alternatives to the death penalty itself, not the method by which it is carried out.

Texas Executes Carry Kerr; South Carolina Executes Jeffrey Motts

Two executions in the United States last week.

On Tuesday May 3rd, Texas executed Carry Kerr (46). It was the state's first execution using a new three-drug cocktail, using pentobarbital instead of sodium thiopental. Kerr was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a 34-year old woman in 2001. In his last statement, he proclaimed his innocence before asking his friends to find the person he claimed committed the crime, saying: "Check that DNA. Check Scott."
Kerr is the 3rd inmate to be executed in Texas this year, and the 467th in the state since they resumed executions in 1982.

On Friday May 6th, South Carolina executed Jeffrey Motts (36). Mott's execution also used the sedative pentobarbital in the place of sodium thiopental. He was sentenced to death for the 2005 murder of his cellmate at a state prison in Greenville County, where he was serving a life sentence for killing 2 elderly people during a robbery in 1995. Motts abandoned his appeals and volunteered for the death chamber. In a final statement read by his attorney before he died, Motts apologized to the victims' families, his own families, and anyone he hurt along the way. In his last statement, he also mentioned his drug addiction, saying he wanted to warn kids of the dangers of drugs.
Motts is the 1st inmate to be executed in South Carolina this year.

URGENT APPEAL for Troy Davis

Georgia death row inmate Troy Davis is facing the possibility of his fourth execution date in four years after the US Supreme Court dismissed his appeal on 28 March. Doubts persist about his guilt in the crime for which he was sentenced to death two decades ago.


Troy Davis was sentenced to death in 1991 for the murder of police officer Mark Allen MacPhail in Savannah, Georgia in 1989. No physical evidence directly links Davis to the murder – no murder weapon was ever found. The case against Davis primarily rested on witness testimony. Since his trial, seven of nine key witnesses have recanted or changed their testimony, some alleging police coercion.

In 2009, the US Supreme Court ordered a federal evidentiary hearing to review Troy Davis’ innocence claim.

At the hearing in June 2010, US District Court Judge William Moore addressed not whether the state could demonstrate a watertight case against Troy Davis, but whether Davis could show “by clear and convincing evidence that no reasonable juror would have convicted him in the light of the new evidence” that had emerged since his 1991 murder trial. Under this “extraordinarily high” standard, Judge Moore wrote, “Mr Davis is not innocent”. Elsewhere in his ruling, however, he acknowledged that the new evidence presented by Troy Davis cast “some additional, minimal” doubt on his conviction, and that the state’s case was not “ironclad”. In 1991, the jury had found Troy Davis guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt,” Judge Moore noted, “but not to a mathematical certainty”.

On 28 March, the US Supreme Court refused to take the Davis case, clearing the way for Georgia to set an execution date. Troy Davis was less than 24 hours from execution in 2007 when the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles issued a stay. The Board said in 2007 that it would not allow an execution to go ahead “unless and until its members are convinced that there is no doubt as to the guilt of the accused”. Since then Troy Davis has faced two more execution dates, both in 2008, which were stayed by the courts.
Since 2007, three states in the USA have legislated to abolish the death penalty. When signing the abolitionist bills into law the three state governors all pointed to the risk of irrevocable error as a reason to support abolition. Since Troy Davis has been on death row, more than 90 prisoners have been released from death rows around the country on grounds of innocence. In each case, at trial the defendant had been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.


For more information about Troy Davis case, see here and here from Amnesty International.


RECOMMENDED ACTION: Please send appeals to arrive as quickly as possible:

-Acknowledging the seriousness of the crime for which Troy Davis was sentenced to death;
-Noting that doubts persist in the case even after the federal evidentiary hearing in 2010;
-Pointing out that the Board acts as a failsafe against irreversible error, and recalling its statement in 2007 that it would not allow any execution to proceed where there was any doubt about the guilt of the prisoner;
-Pointing to the substantial evidence of the fallibility of the capital justice system;
-Calling on the Board to grant clemency and to commute the death sentence of Troy Davis.

APPEALS TO:

State Board of Pardons and Paroles
2 Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, SE
Suite 458, Balcony Level, East Tower
Atlanta, Georgia 30334-4909, USA

Salutation: Dear Board members

You can email us for more information about Troy Davis or advice on what you can do to help.
I also have some statistics about the reliability of witness testimony from studying psychology this year, which we might be able to quote to back up our arguments.

UK Bans Export of 3 More Lethal Injection Drugs To US

The Department for Business in the UK is introducing controls on the export of drugs to the US which are used in lethal injections.

The government will put in measures to prevent the export to the US of three drugs used in executions, following the previous emergency export control of sodium thiopental - the drug used to anaesthetise the condemned inmate in a lethal injection - which prisons in the US were buying from the UK to due to shortages of the drug.

The UK government now intends to control the export to the US of these drugs:
1. Pancuronium bromide - muscle relaxant which is the second drug in the three-drug sequence used by many states, and causes paralysis of the condemned inmate.
2. Potassium chloride - the third drug in the three-drug sequence, which stops the heart of the condemned inmate.
3. Sodium pentobarbital - this drug is often used to put down animals, but has recently been used in a number of executions in the US due to dwindling supplies of sodium thiopental.

The US are now turning to a Danish company, Lundbeck, for the drugs they need to carry out executions.

As a British citizen, I'm personally very glad to hear that my country has decided not to assist the US in committing legal murder. The UK fully abolished the death penalty in 1998, although the last execution was in 1964. The UK does not the support the death penalty, and as such we shouldn't be helping other countries to carry out executions. This is a positive step in the right direction, and will hopefully inspire other countries carrying out exports to the US of lethal drugs to do the same.

Reprimand For Texas Psychologist Who Approved Defendants For Execution

Psychologist Dr. George Denkowski was recently reprimanded and fined by the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists. The psychologist had examined a number of death row inmates for intellecutal disabilities and found 16 to be suitable for execution, two of whom were subsequently put to death.

"There’s absolutely no scientific basis to his procedure,” said Marc J. Tassé, director of the Ohio State University Nisonger Center and an expert in developmental disabilities.


The unscientific methods used by Denkowski have been criticised by others in the field, and he has agreed not to conduct intellecutal disability evaluations in future criminal cases, on top of a $5,500 fine as part of a settlement.

Sorry for unexplained silence from us + no more death penalty in Illinois!

I want to apologise for my sudden and unexplained silence - my computer got a virus and is away getting fixed, and in the small amounts of computer time I've managed to glean in its absence, I haven't had time to update this blog at all and a LOT has happened in the last couple of weeks. As soon as I get my computer back, I'm sure I'll have to catch up on everything I've missed but for now I'm just going to focus on the thing we've all been waiting for: the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois!

Yes, Governor Pat Quinn signed into law a historic ban on the death penalty in Illinois on March 9th, as well as commuting the sentences of 15 death row inmates to life without parole. 

In his signing statement, Quinn wrote: "For me, this was a difficult decision, quite literally the choice between life and death. This was not a decision to be made lightly, or a decision that I can to without deep personal reflection."

Quinn also wrote that he saw abolition as the right choice due to the irreparably imperfect system.

In 2000, former governor George Ryan declared a moratorium on executions after it was discovered that 13 men on death row in the state had been wrongly convicted. There has not been an execution since. 

The ban takes effect on July 1st.

URGENT APPEAL FOR JOHNNIE BASTON

Johnnie Baston, a 35-year-old African American man, is scheduled to be executed in Ohio on March 10th. He was sentenced to death for a murder committed during a robbery in 1994.

Baston was arrested after police recieved information that he was involved in the robbery of a retail store in Toledo, Ohio, during the course of which Chong Hoon Mah was fatally shot. Baston told police he had participated in the robbery with an accomplice called 'Ray', a high-ranking gang member, who was the gunman. When the police could not locate 'Ray', they believed Baston must have acted alone. He pled not guilty, and was sentenced to death in 1995 when he was just over 20-years-old, and has been on death row for 16 years.

Baston had a difficult childhood. After being abandoned by his mother soon after his birth, he suffered physical abuse and neglect at the hands of his father, and was adopted by an aunt. At a clemency hearing before the Ohio Adult Parole Authority earlier in the month, she said his parental abandonment had led to severe behavioural problems in his teenage years. She threw him out of the house a week before the crime.

The Mah family are opposed to the execution because of their respect for human life. The family were opposed to the death penalty during the trial as well. Last month, Chong Mah's son signed a statement that "my family and I are opposed to Mr Baston being executed".

You can read more about the case here.


RECOMMENDED ACTION: Please send appeals to arrive as quickly as possible:
- Acknowledging the seriousness of the crime for which Johnnie Baston was sentenced to death;
- Calling on the governor to commute the death sentence and to work to lead Ohio away from the death penalty.

APPEALS TO:
Governor of Ohio
Governor John Kasich
Riffe Center, 30th Floor, 77 South High Street
Columbus, Oh 43215-6117,
USA
Fax: 1 614 466 9354
Email: http://governor.ohio.gov/ShareYourIdeas.aspx
Salutation: Dear Governor


PLEASE SEND APPEALS IMMEDIATELY.

You can email us at deathwatchstardoll@hotmail.co.uk if you want to know more.

Texas Executes Timothy Adams

Timothy Adams was executed in the state of Texas Tuesday night for the 2002 fatal shooting of his 19-month-old son.

The execution took place moments after the Supreme Court rejected a final appeal from his attorneys.

Members of Adams' family and 3 of the 12 jurors who sentenced him to death were appealing for his sentence to be commuted.

Adams' execution is the second carried out in Texas so far this year, and the 8th so far in the US in 2011.

Ohio Executes Frank G. Spisak Jr.

Frank G. Spisak Jr. was executed early on Thursday morning in Ohio.

Spisak, a Hitler devotee, killed 3 men and wounded another during his 1982 murder spree on the Cleveland State University campus. He was pronounced dead at 10:34a.m.

Spisak is the first condemned inmate to be put to death so far this year in Ohio, and the 7th so far in the USA. His execution is the last in which the state will use the drug sodium thiopental, in the midst of  nationwide shortages and the discontinuation of its production in Italy. The state intends to use a single drug - Pentobarbital, also called Nembutal - in future executions, the next of which is scheduled for March 10th.

Texas Executes Michael Wayne Hall

Yesterday, Michael Wayne Hall was executed by lethal injection in Texas, the first execution of the year for America's most active death penalty state.

The 31-year-old was sentenced to death for the 1998 torture and murder of a mentally challenged woman, alongside Robert Neville who was executed 5 years ago.

In his final statement, with relatives of his victim, Amy Robinson, watching him, Hall repeatedly asked for forgiveness.

"I would like to give my sincere apology to Amy's family," he said, his eyes watery. "We caused a lot of heartache, grief, pain and suffering, and I am sorry. I know it won't bring her back."

Hall is the 6th condemned person to be executed in the US this year. He is the first person this year to be executed in Texas, and the 465th overall in the state since it resumed the death penalty in 1982.

Innocent Man Spent 18 Years on Death Row, and Texas Won't Pay Him a Dime

I read this on Facebook not long ago, and wanted to throw something - the injustice is just infuriating.

As you may already know, Anthony Graves spent a shocking 18 years on death row for murders he did not commit and was exonerated in November of 2010, thankfully before his death sentence could be carried out. To read more about his case and exoneration, click here.

He would have been elegible to receive compensation of $1.4 million for his wrongful conviction, had the document ordering his release contained just one little word: innocence.

But the document did not, and so he gets nothing.

Graves is innocent. But because the word wasn't included in the order which dismissed the charges against him, he doesn't get a dime for that great big error which cost him 18 years of his life. His attorney, Nicole Casarez, says the Texas Comptroller's Office should have taken her client's unique circumstances into consideration. I have to agree.

Grave's cannot seek a pardon from Governor Rick Perry because, after all, there's nothing for him to be pardoned for - asking to be pardoned would be admitting guilt for something he hasn't done. Casarez said a civil suit seeking compensation is one of several options which will be discussed with attorneys specialising in that kind of law.

What gets me so riled up about this is the hypocrisy of the whole sordid business. That Texas, a state which frequently forces people to pay the ultimate price for their mistakes, refuses to face up to and pay the price for its own errors. Instead, they sweep things under the rug, and innocent people suffer.

Maybe if the state wasn't wasting millions of dollars on the death penalty every year, they'd have enough cash left over to compensate the man from whom they stole 18 years of his life.

URGENT APPEAL FOR TIMOTHY ADAMS

Timothy Adams is due to be executed in Texas on February 22nd. Three of the jurors who sentenced him to death are now urging that his sentence be commuted. Two mentioned feeling "pressured" into voting for a death sentence by other members of the jury.

Adams killed his 19-month-old son, and has never tried to deny it. His family in this case are also the family of the victim. His family are also appealing for clemency. Adams sister said that his death would be "another huge loss to our family".

To read a more thorough account of Adams case, click here to go to Death Penalty News.

Please help us take immediate action to try and spare Adams from execution. Here are some things you can do:

Write an appeal to:

Clemency Section, Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles
8610 Shoal Creek Blvd.
Austin, TX 78757-6814
USA
Fax 512 467 0945
Email: bpp-pio@tdcj.state.tx.us
Salutation: Dear Board members


Governor Rick Perry
Office of the Governor
P.O. Box 12428
Austin, TX 78711-2428
USA
Fax: 1 512 463 1849
Salutation: Dear Governor


Here is some advice for what you should write in your appeal:
Acknowledge the seriousness of the crime for which Adams was sentenced to death.
Note that 3 of the jurors from his murder trial are calling for the sentence to be commuted.
Call on the authorities to recognise the suffering that execution causes family members.
If writing to the parole board: urge them to recommend to the Governor that he commute the death sentence.
If writing to Governor Perry: urge him to do all within his power and influence to stop the execution.


If you live in the US, you can also sign an online petition here. Unfortunately, you can't sign it if you don't live in the US.

PLEASE take immediate action to help Timothy Adams. Do as much as you can. Email us if you have any questions: deathwatchstardoll@hotmail.co.uk