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Arkansas 

Jack Gordon Greene (AR) – W/?
Dec. 14, 1999…9:00pm (EST)

Jack Greene wants to be executed.  Since his conviction for the 1991 slaying of retired minister Sidney Burnett, he has been asking to die.

His first request to drop all appeals — a handwritten note — was rejected because it was filed without an attorney.  In asking a second time, Greene said “as far as I’m concerned, they can go ahead and put the needle in my arm.”  At this time, his third request appears to have a good chance of being honored by the state of Arkansas.

Lost in the state’s frenzy to rid itself of Mr. Greene, is the fact that his case is riddled with legal and procedural mistakes.  Botched competency hearings, denial of fair access to counsel and wrongful exclusion of mitigating evidence are just a few of the serious errors state and federal courts have charged to Arkansas in its effort to put Jack on the gurney.  All told, Jack has been sentenced to death three times for the same crime.
 

D.H. Fleenor (IN) – W/?
Dec. 9, 1999…10:00am (EST)

On the evening of December 12, 1982, D.H. Fleenor shot his in-laws, Mr. and Mrs. Harlow, after a domestic argument.

During his trial the victims’ daughter, Sandy Sedam, expressed her opposition to the death penalty and how she had been influenced by her parent’s abolitionist views.

Fleenor’s past is marked by heavy alcohol and drug abuse. Several days before the incident, he and his wife sought, but were refused, help for his alcohol problems.  Fleenor drank before committing the crime.

Fleenor was physically abused as a child and is mentally retarded.  He has an IQ of 75 and once suffered a shotgun blast to the head which resulted in the loss of his left eye and significant brain damage.

Recently, Indiana passed legislation barring the imposition of the death penalty on mentally retarded inmates.  But the new law is not retroactive.  Please contact Governor Frank O’Bannon and remind him that the state of Indiana has spoken: it is wrong to execute people who suffer from mental retardation!
 

North Carolina

Wendell Flowers (NC) – B/?
Dec. 17, 1999…2:00am (EST) 

Wendell Flowers was serving a life sentence for his involvement in the 1981 murder of store owner Thomas Greer when he made what could be a fatal mistake.  He acted as a lookout in a prison assault which resulted in the death of fellow inmate Rufus Watson.  Wendell was subsequently sentenced to death and has been close to execution several times in the last few years.

Since being sentenced to die, Wendell has vacillated between giving up his appeals and continuing his struggle with the state.  According to the Durham-based Center for Death Penalty Litigation (CDPL), Wendell is “somebody who flip-flops a lot.”

Currently, Wendell is not pursuing appeals.  The CDPL has asked that activists write to Governor Jim Hunt on Wendell’s behalf.  Letters, e-mails, phone calls and faxes should focus on the fact that Wendell was the triggerman in neither of the crimes for which he was incarcerated and sentenced to death.
 

Oklahoma

Cornel Cooks (OK) – B/W
Dec. 2, 1999…1:01am (EST) 

“That’s what they do to niggers who rape white women.”

These elucidating words were reportedly delivered to Cornel Cooks by his trial attorney, who labored to explain to his mentally impaired client the meaning of the state’s intent to pursue the death penalty for the rape and murder of a white 87-year-old Lawton woman.

Unfortunately, the young attorney did not favor Cooks’ jury with a similarly bracing appraisal of the injuries wrought by Cooks’ horrific history of childhood abuse at the hands of his stepfather, who not only terrorized the family physically but encouraged young Cornel to begin
drinking at age five, leading to a spiral of substance abuse that inflicted irreversible brain damage.

Effectively a street urchin for much of his juvenile life, Cooks lagged even in the special education classes to which he was consigned before dropping out of school altogether.  A psychological examination found noticeable impairment in memory, concentration, speech and abstract thinking.

Cooks’ jury, however, heard none of this evidence during sentencing.  Nor did they learn that he had no significant criminal history, that during intermittent periods of sobriety he was caring and responsible, and that he had expressed shame and remorse for the crime.

In fact, Cooks’ attorney, just two years out of law school and working alone on a case during the infancy of the restructured death penalty process, was so ill-prepared for the sentencing phase of the trial that he presented no mitigating evidence whatsoever.

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals found the lawyer’s conduct incompetent, but ruled that the jury likely would have sentenced Cooks to death anyway.  And perhaps that’s true.  The attorney, after all, was right about one thing:

Cooks’ white co-defendant was sentenced to life.
 
 

Bobby Lynn Ross (OK) – B/W
Dec. 9, 1999…1:01am (EST) 

It’s an all too familiar story.  Bobby Ross was black and a citizen of Oklahoma.  Sergeant Steven Mahan was white and an officer of the law.  Bobby shot officer Mahan after an armed robbery.  He was promptly charged with capital murder.

Several things could have gone better for Bobby at trial.  Three jurors were rejected at voir dire for their reservations about the death penalty.  The district attorney’s office reneged on a deal that would have kept Bobby off the row.  And, his attorney was denied access to expert witnesses because the trial court would not approve funding citing cost considerations. 

28 of the 100 people executed in Oklahoma since 1915 were blacks.  African-Americans make up less than 8 percent of the state’s population.  The next three men scheduled to be executed in Oklahoma are all black. Justice as usual in the Sooner state.  
 

David Rocheville (SC) – W/?
Dec. 3, 1999…6:00pm (EST)

In January 1991, David Rocheville admittedly kidnaped and murdered David Green in conjunction with the robbery of a movie theater in Spartanburg, South Carolina.  His accomplice, Richard Longworth, was also sentenced to death not only for his role in Green’s murder, but for the robbery and murder of Alex Hopps.

The disparity in the defense received by David and Mr. Longworth smacks of extreme unfairness.  While Longworth was represented by three attorneys, David, unaware that as an indigent defendant he had the right to two defense counsel, had his family hire an attorney with what little money they could scrape together.  On appeal, the South Carolina courts held that since David had obtained counsel on his own, the trial judge did not err in both declaring him indigent and not appointing appropriate counsel.

David Rocheville was only 23 years old and without prior criminal background when he was arrested. His family and twenty-three other character witnesses testified that his actions were brought on by heavy drinking and a lapse in judgment.
 

Texas

David Martin Long (TX) – W/?
Dec. 8, 1999…7:00pm (EST) 

David Long, a drug abuser who has been in and out of mental institutions for most of his life, is awaiting execution for murdering three people with a hatchet in a paranoid fit 13 years ago.

Long was picked up by Donna Jester while hitchhiking, and because he was homeless, Donna allowed him to stay in her home with her mother and a friend in exchange for house repairs.  Over the next week, Long developed an irrational suspicion that his hosts were plotting his death, and, perhaps intoxicated, attacked them without provocation.

Although he is now resisting his execution, Long initially made a concerted effort to position himself for a death sentence, telling an interrogating officer on the day of his arrest that he wanted a death sentence “because I can’t live in this society.”  He also confessed to two earlier murders.

Shackled throughout his trial – and bombastically compared to Hitler by the state – Long must have been easy for the jury to see as a predator and monster.  But there is another way to see him as well: a tragic, drug-addled castaway served best by his fellows when he asked to be discarded.
 
 

James Lee Beathard (TX) – W/?
Dec. 9, 1999…7:00pm (EST)

James Beathard was convicted in 1985 of participating in Gene Hathorn, Jr.’s plot to murder his family for an inheritance.  Beathard claims that he accompanied Hathorn to what he believed was a drug deal, and that Hathorn committed the murders by himself.  Hathorn, who admitted gunning down his parents with a shotgun blast through the window, testified that he recruited Beathard to help break into the house and kill his family.

After Hathorn himself was sentenced to death, he recanted his testimony and sought to exculpate Beathard, saying that he accused an innocent man in an attempt to save his own life.  Although some physical and eyewitness evidence corroborates details of Hathorn’s original account, this recantation casts serious doubt on Beathard’s guilt.  However, Texas’ notorious “30-day rule” which bars even the most significant new evidence from being introduced once 30 days have passed from the end of the original trial, has blocked Beathard’s efforts to win a hearing on Hathorn’s about-face.
 
 

Robert Atworth (TX) – W/?
Dec. 14, 1999…7:00pm (EST)

“I think anxiety would kill me before the state would.”  Robert Atworth was convicted of killing Thomas Calsson in April 1995 and has asked to drop all appeals. The state of Texas has set his execution date for September 14th.

According to Marta Glass from the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty requests for execution are becoming more common in the way death row conditions becoming more oppressive.  Lately visitation rules has been cracked down and the right to assemble for religious services was taken away from the prisoners. 

“A lot of people are giving up hope,” says Ms. Glass, “it used to be they’d have hope almost until the end, but the conditions on death row and the huge number of executions are causing them to lose hope.”
 
 

Sammy Felder, Jr. (TX) – B/?
Dec. 15, 1999…7:00pm (EST)

Sammy Felder, Jr. has spent most of his adult life staying alive in that most inhospitable of climates, death row in Texas.

Three times he has been tried for the stabbing death of a quadriplegic during a botched robbery in 1974, and three times he has been convicted and condemned to die.  After nearly a quarter-century, Felder seems at long last to be running out of legal recourse.

Testimony from family and friends, as well as from prison psychiatrists and chaplains, characterizes him as friendly, respectful and nonviolent.  Felder himself has said that he wanted to testify to his juries about his own remorse over the crime, but was constrained from doing so by the so-called “Texas waiver rule,” a perverse doctrine which until overturned by state courts last year considered any punishment-phase admission of culpability (obviously a necessary condition of expressing remorse) as effectively a guilty plea which waived grounds for appeal on all errors during the guilt phase.
 

Virginia

Andre Graham (VA) – B/?
Dec. 9, 1999…9:00pm (EST)

Andre Graham was sentenced to death for the 1993 robbery and shooting of a couple in a hotel parking lot, in which one victim was killed and the other survived to testify against Graham.  He is also serving a life sentence in an unrelated capital murder conviction, for which his accomplice was executed in 1993.

Graham has been uncommonly tidy in his appeals, helpfully conceding in briefs that he “has no additional argument that has not been raised by other death penalty defendants in cases previously cited by this court.”

A drug dealer, Graham is an extremely unsympathetic character.  He tests at below-average intelligence, but is not mentally retarded.  The principal factual question at issue in his case is whether Graham was himself the triggerman, which is not known for certain although circumstantial evidence suggests that he was.

But in spite of all his violent history, a forensic pathologist testified that Graham would pose no particular threat if given a life sentence.