NCADP  
1436 U Street,  
NW Suite 104  
Washington DC   
20009  

888-286-2237  
[email protected] 

. 

Larry Robison (TX) 
August 17, 1999…7:00pm (EST) 

Editor’s Note: After this article was written, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down Larry’s federal habeas petition.   Please contact the officials listed below about Larry’s case.  Feel free to draw comparisons to Larry’s story and that of Calvin Swann in Virginia.  Despite taking a consistently hard line on the death penalty (he has never granted clemency until now) Governor James Gilmore commuted Mr. Swann’s sentence on the basis of mental incompetence. 
  
To receive updates on the effort to save Larry’s life, send an e-mail to [email protected].  This will subscribe you to a listserv which has been set up to keep activists informed about Larry’s case. 
 
My husband Ken and I are the Co-Directors of HOPE, a chapter of Texas CURE which deals 
with the issue of capital punishment.  I am a retired third grade school teacher, and Ken is a college 
instructor.  We have eight children, 15 grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.  We are an average 
family except that we have a son on Death Row. 

Larry was the kind of boy that every mother dreams of having.  He was a good student, 
played in little league, was on the swim team, played drums in the high school band, and would have 
made Eagle Scout if he hadn’t become ill.  By the time he was in junior high, we knew that 
something was wrong. 

At first we suspected drugs, because like most young people of his generation, Larry had 
experimented with them.  We tried to get help for him in Kansas City, Kansas, where we lived at the 
time.  Unfortunately, we did not know of the family history of mental illness, and he was not given 
a correct diagnosis until several years later after he was discharged from the Air Force. 

Larry was first diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic at Huguley Hospital in Fort Worth when 
he was 21 years old.  Because our insurance no longer covered him, he was discharged.  We were 
told to take him to John Peter Smith County Hospital where he was kept for thirty days and 
discharged because he was “not violent” and they “needed the bed.”  When I said, “He has no job, 
no money, no car, and no place to stay, you can’t just put him out on the street,” I was told, 
“We do it every day.  You would be surprised how many schizophrenics are on the streets. 
Most of them cope very well.” 

We took him to Veteran’s Hospital in Waco where they kept him for 30 days and discharged 
him.  We were told he was not well and would get worse without treatment but that they couldn’t 
keep him any longer because he was “not violent” and they “needed the bed.”  If he became violent, 
we were told, he could get the long term treatment that everyone agreed he needed.  The VA doctors forgot to have Larry sign a release before he left, so we were unable to get medication for him at the Fort Worth Mental Health/Mental Retardation offices.  Because of the Privacy Act, none of the doctors or hospitals informed us that he needed his medication every day in order to cope.  No one would tell us what to do to help Larry. 

The first and only violence he was accused of was killing five people.  We were horrified, 
and we thought he would finally be committed to a mental institution, probably for life.  We were 
wrong.  He was arrested, held a year without bail, not given a sanity hearing, and in spite of his 
medical history, found sane and sentenced to death.  In the sixteen years since Larry went to Death 
Row he has seen a psychiatrist only twice – both times initiated by our family.  He has never 
received any medication or mental health treatment in jail or prison.  They do not use any of the 
newer drugs which really help the mentally ill… 

We believe that if people knew the facts, they would insist that all mentally ill persons get 
the medical help they need.  Although most never become violent, the ones who have that potential 
can only be stopped by preventive treatment.  The threat of punishment, even death, means nothing 
to a psychotic person.  You can execute as many of them as you wish, and it will not stop the next 
one.  If we really want to stop these most horrendous crimes, and be safe in our homes and on our 
streets, prevention is the only answer… 

Since Larry went to Death Row we have met many families who have mentally ill, mentally 
retarded, or brain-damaged relatives in prison.  Approximately one-third of the people on Death Row are mentally impaired.  There are more of them in jails and prisons in Texas than there are in mental hospitals.  Yet programs to treat mental illness would be less expensive than incarceration in prison and much less expensive than execution, which costs over $2 million each.  It is a much more cost-effective and humane way to treat our handicapped citizens…The state of Texas is almost at the 
bottom of the 50 states in resources for the mentally ill and yet it is at the very top in prisons and 
executions.  There is something wrong with this picture. 

Larry’s appeal was turned down by the Fifth Circuit Court, and his case is now in the U.S. 
Supreme Court.  This is Larry’s last chance, and the present political climate does not offer much 
hope. 

Whatever happens in Larry’s case, we are committed to changing our laws and agencies so 
that this kind of tragedy does not continue to happen to other people.  If telling his story can prevent 
others from suffering and dying in the future, then all the pain will not be in vain. 

Joseph Trevino (TX) 
August 18, 1999…7:00pm (EST) 

In 1983, at the age of nineteen, Joseph Mario Trevino was convicted and was sentenced to 
death for strangling eighty-year-old Blanche Miller. 

The trial court did not require that the jury be informed of and consider significant mitigating 
factors such as age, psychological condition, background, personal social history, family stability, 
etc. that are mandatory for the deliberation of capital cases. The trial court dismissed as hearsay 
evidence from the Harris Department of Education, which at the request of the Harris County 
Probation Office, conducted a psychological study of Joseph when he was twelve. 

Joseph was convicted by an all-white jury.  As a Latino, Joe decided to appeal his case based 
on his Sixth amendment right to be tried by a “fair cross-section of the community.” The U.S. 
Supreme Court, relying on the Fourteenth amendment rather than the Sixth, reversed and remanded 
Joseph’s case based on its Batson v. Kentucky decision, which prohibits prosecutors from 
excluding jurors based on race. 

During this second round of appeals, Joe sought habeas relief from the U.S. District Court 
and requested the recuse of Judge John H. McBryde on the grounds that he was biased. Joe’s 
attorney, Assistant Federal Public Defender Art Brender, was subpoenaed to testify against Judge 
McBryde on misconduct charges.  However, the Court of Appeals denied Joe’s petition stating that 
the district judge was not required to recuse himself nor was the defendant entitled to a certificate 
of appealability. With Judge McBryde presiding, Joe’s petition for habeas corpus relief was 
subsequently denied. 

Rickie Wayne Smith (TX) 
August 18, 1999…7:00pm (EST) 

Rickie Wayne Smith, a drug addict since childhood and a career criminal, was sentenced to 
death in 1993 for the slaying of a convenience store clerk in a robbery.  Apparently high at the time 
of the murder, he claimed he couldn’t remember committing it although he admits that security 
cameras implicate him. 

His primary appeal claim — and it is a weak reed — is that the trial court improperly permitted 
victim-impact testimony as to the good character of the victim, who was also a dedicated special 
education teacher.  Although victim impact statements are permitted in Texas, they are not supposed 
to alter the sentence by encouraging a “comparative analysis of the worth of the victim” — a plainly 
untenable legal fiction.  The prosecutor told the jury during sentencing: 

“You will remember who [the victim] is.  A special education schoolteacher, a very loving 
person, a very giving person, who gave and gave all of her life to the extent that she even worked 
an extra job so that she would have the money not only to carry on her own personal needs, but to 
provide that little bit extra for those special education students that she had at Lamar Elementary 
School. This is a woman, like I say, there’s no evidence she did anything but good.” 

Although appellate courts have found that evidence concerning the victim’s character was 
improperly permitted by the trial court, they have ruled it a “harmless error” which did not influence 
the outcome of the trial, an increasingly typical occurrence as courts have come under pressure to 
accelerate executions. 
 

Marlon Dewayne Williams awaits execution in Virginia for the 1993 murder of Helen 
Bedsole.  After being paid $4,000 for the murder by the victim’s husband, Marlon shot Mrs. Bedsole twice in the head.  Mrs. Bedsole’s husband received life imprisonment. 

Marlon claims his counsel was ineffective in two ways.  First, he believes that his counsel 
did not develop mitigating evidence about his troubled childhood.  Second, he believes his counsel 
failed to obtain psychological testimony. 

As a child, Marlon was severely abused by his mother and stepfather.   After being beaten 
with a broom stick, the Department of Social Services had to remove him from his mother’s care. 
He was continually moved to various care givers.  As a child he was diagnosed with clinical 
depression which psychologists attributed to the abuse by his parents and the lack of stable 
relationships in his life. 

Marlon refused a psychiatric evaluation before his trial because he did not want to be 
portrayed as crazy.  Without a psychiatric evaluation, the judge could not determine Marlon’s future 
danger to society.  During federal habeas, a psychiatrist examined Marlon and determined that he 
suffered from attachment disorder and that he might respond well to treatment and would adapt to 
a structured prison environment. 

Marlon is another sad case of a victim of society becoming a victimizer.  Don’t let him 
become a victim of lethal injection as well. 

Steven Roach (VA) 
August 25, 1999…9:00pm (EST) 

Steve Roach was convicted of murdering his 70 year-old neighbor Mary Ann Hughes in 
April, 1993.  Roach was only 17 years old at the time of the crime.  Tried as an adult, Roach was 
sentenced to death, despite the absence of aggravating circumstances warranting the death penalty, 
and despite the presence of mitigating evidence warranting a life sentence. 

Under Commonwealth law, capital punishment may only be imposed upon a finding that 1) 
there is a probability that the defendant will commit violent criminal acts in the future; or 2) the 
crime was so vile, wanton or inhuman that it resulted in torture, depravity of mind or aggravated 
battery against the victim.  The jury convicted Roach solely on the probability of his being a future 
danger to society after the trial judge found that the Commonwealth had not sufficiently shown that 
Roach’s crime was vile, wanton or inhuman.  This, despite the fact that there was no additional 
evidence demonstrating that Roach was likely to commit violent crimes in the future. 

Further, the jury seemed to disregard such mitigating factors as Roach’s age, the lack of a 
violent criminal background, his work in the community and with his church, his tumultuous family 
life, and his questionable mental state.  Although Roach’s case is not a question of innocence, it does 
demonstrate an instance where mitigating factors outweigh aggravating factors, making the 
imposition of death unjust. 

The United States Court of Appeals has recently denied Roach’s petition for federal habeas 
corpus relief.  Unless the United States Supreme Court consents to hearing Roach’s appeal, he will 
be put to death on August 25, 1999.  Don’t let the Commonwealth of Virginia mortally punish 
another juvenile offender.  Speak out before it’s too late!