URGENT ACTION APPEAL
2 January 2007
UA 01/07 Death penalty/Legal concern
USA (Texas) Ronald Curtis Chambers (m), black, aged 51
Ronald Chambers is scheduled to be executed in Texas on 25 January for a
murder committed during a robbery in 1975. He has been in custody for the
past 31 years, almost all of it on death row.
Two college students, Mike McMahan and Deia Sutton, both white, were robbed
and shot in Dallas on 11 April 1975. Mike McMahan died, while Deia Sutton
survived.
Ronald Chambers and Clarence Williams were arrested within a few days and
charged with the crime. Clarence Williams reached a plea arrangement under
which he received two life sentences. He is still in custody.
Ronald Chambers was sentenced to death in 1976 for the murder of Mike
McMahan. This was overturned in 1984 because Chambers had been interviewed
by the state's psychologist without being informed that what he said could
be used to support a death sentence. He was condemned to death at a second
trial in 1985. This was reversed in 1986 due to discriminatory jury
selection by the state. He was tried for a third time in 1992 and again
sentenced to death.
In Texas, a jury has to determine a number of ''special issues'', including
whether the defendant will pose a future danger to society if allowed to
live, even in prison (the ''future dangerousness'
this third trial, Ronald Chambers had been in prison for 17 years. While he
had some minor disciplinary infractions on his record, there was no evidence
that he had committed violent acts in prison. At the time of the crime 17
years earlier, Ronald Chambers was 20 years old, without a history of
violence. His lawyers presented mitigating evidence of his difficult
childhood growing up in the rough neighborhood of West Dallas where crime
and drugs were rife. They presented evidence of his good character, his
remorse about the crime, and of his continuing positive relationships with
family members including his daughter.
The jurors never learned that his co-defendant would serve a life sentence.
The defense tried to introduce evidence of Clarence Williams's prior
convictions for violent offences, the claim that he had been the driving
force in this crime, and that it would be unfair to execute Chambers if
Williams was allowed to live. However, the judge ruled that the defense
could only admit the fact of Williams's conviction and life sentence in the
McMahan case, and no further detail.
They decided not to do so on the grounds that without the extra background,
the bare fact that Williams was serving a life sentence could act as an
aggravating factor against Chambers by, they argued, presenting a misleading
picture of the two men's relative culpability.
Even without this evidence, two jurors at Chambers's sentencing, including
the jury foreperson, initially supported a ''no'' to the future
dangerousness question while 10 voted ''yes''. The jury twice sent a note to
the judge that they were deadlocked. Each time, the judge ordered them to
continue deliberating.
Five and a half hours after they began, they reached a verdict, having
unanimously answered ''yes'' to the dangerousness question. The foreperson
was reportedly crying as she handed the verdict to the court.
Chambers's appeal lawyers have presented evidence that the jurors wrongly
assumed they had to be unanimous on the dangerousness question whereas, in
fact, if they had been unable to reach unanimity, a life sentence would have
been the result. The jury had been given the temporary instructions
formulated after the US Supreme Court had found the previous ones
unconstitutional on the grounds that they did not allow jurors to give
mitigating effect to certain evidence. Over the years, the Supreme Court has
made a number of rulings concerning Texas capital jury instructions, and is
due to hear oral arguments this month in three cases involving the
instructions used around the time of Ronald Chambers's third trial. His
appeal lawyers have argued that if the jurors had been given the
instructions now in use in Texas, the jurors' confusion would have been
avoided and they would have been able to give full consideration and full
mitigating effect to all of the defense's evidence. In addition, they have
argued that if the jurors had known of his co-defendant'
vote for a life sentence for Chambers also would have been more likely.
Chambers's appeal lawyers have also argued that the length of time he has
spent on death row - the result of constitutional violations by the state
that led to the need for retrials - amounts to ''cruel and unusual''
punishment prohibited by the US Constitution. The Supreme Court has not
ruled on this issue directly, but individual Justices have raised their
concerns. For example, in an opinion in November 2006 involving a California
case that was 25 years old, four Justices wrote that ''the incremental value
to California of carrying out a death sentence at this late date is far
outweighed by the interest in maintaining confidence in the fairness of any
proceeding that results in a State's decision to take the life of one of its
citizens.''
In 1995, Justice Stevens wrote that executing a prisoner who had been on
death row for 17 years - over a decade less than Ronald Chambers has
suffered - arguably negated any deterrent or retributive justification for
the punishment, supposedly the two main social purposes of the death
penalty. If these goals no longer existed, he suggested, the outcome would
be ''patently excessive and cruel''. He noted that over a century earlier,
the Supreme Court had recognized that ''when a prisoner sentenced by a court
to death is confined in the penitentiary awaiting the execution of the
sentence, one of the most horrible feelings to which he can be subjected
during that time is the uncertainty during the whole of it''. One other
inmate now on Texas death row was first sentenced in 1976 (the month after
Chambers). He has been found to have gone insane and for more than a decade
has been considered incompetent for execution under the US Constitution.
In 1999, Justice Breyer expressed his concern (in the case of one inmate in
Florida and another in Nebraska who had been on death row for 24 and 19
years respectively) at the ''astonishingly long delays flowing in
significant part from constitutionally defective death penalty procedures''
He suggested that ''where a delay, measured in decades, reflects the State's
own failure to comply with the Constitution'
has rendered the execution inhuman is a particularly strong one.'' In 2002,
in the case of a Florida inmate on death row for about 27 years, Justice
Breyer wrote of this ''extraordinarily long confinement under sentence of
death, a confinement that extends from late youth to later middle age.'' If
executed, Justice Breyer stated, the prisoner would have been ''punished
both by death and also by more than a generation spent in death row's
twilight. It is fairly asked whether such punishment is both unusual and
cruel.''
When Ronald Chambers was first sentenced, no one had been executed in the
USA for almost a decade. Since then, more than 1,057 men and women have been
put to death in the USA, 379 of them in Texas.
RECOMMENDED ACTION: Please send appeals to arrive as quickly as possible:
- explaining that you are not seeking to excuse the murder of Mike McMahan
and the attempted murder of Deia Sutton or to downplay the suffering caused,
but that you oppose the execution of Ronald Chambers;
- noting that Ronald Chambers has been on death row for three decades, and
that US Supreme Court Justices have repeatedly raised concerns that such use
of the death penalty may amount to excessive and cruel punishment in
violation of the US Constitution;
- expressing concern at the apparent confusion among the jurors who
sentenced him to death, and at continuing questions about whether they were
able to give full effect to the mitigating evidence presented on his behalf,
and noting that the jury never knew that his co-defendant had received a
life sentence;
- calling on the Board of Pardons and Paroles to recommend that the Governor
grant clemency;
- calling on the Governor to stop this execution and to do all in his power
to ensure clemency.
APPEALS TO:
Rissie Owens
Presiding Officer
Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles
PO Box 13401
Austin, Texas 78711-3401
Fax: 1 512 463 8120
Salutation: Dear Ms Owens
Governor Rick Perry
Office of the Governor
P.O. Box 12428
Austin, Texas 78711-2428
Fax: 1 512 463 1849
Salutation: Dear Governor
PLEASE SEND APPEALS IMMEDIATELY.
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This Urgent Action may be reposted if kept intact, including contact
information and stop action date (if applicable). Thank you for your help
with this appeal.
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Washington DC 20003
Email: uan@aiusa.org
http://www.amnestyu
Phone: 202.544.0200
Fax: 202.675.8566
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END OF URGENT ACTION APPEAL
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