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Travis County Commissioners Court Passes Moratorium Resolution
Printable Version
After two years of lobbying efforts by Texas Moratorium Network, the Travis County Commissioners Court became the first major local government in Texas to pass a moratorium resolution (see Dallas Morning News article below). TMN's Scott Cobb drafted the resolution, Marisa Fehrenbach persauded County Judge Sam Biscoe (our hero!) to sponsor it and we recruited experts to provide testimony in favor of it, namely: Brian S. Grieg, Partner, Fulbright & Jaworski, LLP; Andrea Keilen, Staff Attorney, Texas Defender Service; Suzi Paynter, Director, Citizenship and Public Policy, Baptist General Convention of Texas; Alison Dieter of Texas Moratorium Network and Hector Ortiz, Austin Coordinator, William C. Velasquez Institute. You can watch a video of the testimony and the vote here. Read the Austin American Statesman article below and below that you can click on a link to a streaming video of the actual testimony and vote.
In 2006, the El Paso Commissioners Court also passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on executions.
But We Need More Victories...
If the Texas Legislature is going to recognize that the people of Texas want and support a moratorium, we need to get more city councils and county commissioner courts to pass moratorium resolutions. The groundwork has been laid by various organizations in several cities, Fort Worth, Houston, Corpus Christi and San Antonio. Now, we need activists in those cities to get together again and plan new pushes to get moratorium resolutions approved. Let us know, if you would like to work on a resolution in your city and we will put you in contact with others in your city who want to help.
Newspaper Coverage
Travis County calls for execution ban 05/18/2003
By TERRENCE STUTZ / The Dallas Morning News
AUSTIN – In an unprecedented request to the Legislature, Travis County commissioners have joined a chorus of death penalty critics across the nation and asked state lawmakers to temporarily halt executions in Texas.
Led by Travis County Judge Sam Biscoe, the Commissioners Court made its county the first in the state to take such action, calling for a moratorium until the fairness of the capital punishment law can be assessed.
This year, Houston Mayor Lee Brown asked Gov. Rick Perry to postpone executions of some death row inmates from Harris County until new DNA testing could be conducted – but the governor rejected his request.
Legislators so far are turning a deaf ear to Travis County's plea, insisting that Texas – which has executed more people than any other state – has fairly administered its capital punishment statute. More than 300 people have been executed in Texas in the last two decades.
In pushing through a resolution seeking the death penalty moratorium, Mr. Biscoe cited the statistics often used by capital punishment critics in asserting the unfairness of the system. Mr. Biscoe, who is black, said there is public concern "that racial and socioeconomic factors influence the decisions to seek or impose the death penalty in Texas."
"Death sentences are given almost exclusively to the poor," he said. "There is evidence of racial bias in the application of the death penalty in Texas, where more than 65 percent of people on death row are people of color."
He noted that most of the leading newspapers in Texas have editorialized for a moratorium and scores of city councils in major cities outside of Texas have passed moratorium resolutions. Also, he said, the former governors of Illinois and Maryland – both supporters of the death penalty – halted executions in their states because of questions over the accuracy and fairness of their capital punishment systems.
Unimpressed
The chairman of the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee, which considers capital punishment bills, is unimpressed with the arguments advanced by Travis County. "It is an insult to victims for them to politically posture and pass a resolution like that," said Rep. Terry Keel, R-Austin, who served as the sheriff of Travis County for nearly a decade before his election to the Legislature.
"In Texas, the decision to prosecute a capital case is made at the county level by county officials. They summon jurors to the county courthouse and county officials argue to those jurors to impose the death penalty," he said.
"Every law we pass on criminal justice, criminal laws and procedure rests with the sound discretion of the locally elected prosecutor. So they need to direct their concerns to their own county government and county officials if they feel there has been some injustice in Travis County."
Mr. Keel said Mr. Biscoe and the county commissioners have not pointed to any capital cases in Travis County that they believe were unjustly decided. Currently, five people convicted in Travis County are on death row.
"I was deeply involved in felony prosecutions in Travis County while I was sheriff and would be the first to be interested in knowing if there is some flaw in the system, but they have not pointed to any specific flaws," he said.
"They need to concentrate on county issues."
Exonerations
However, Mr. Biscoe noted that seven men who once served on death row in Texas were exonerated after their cases were examined, and an additional 100 have been freed from death row in other states since capital punishment was resumed in the United States more than 20 years ago.
"I think a moratorium is the right thing to do," he said, also citing "growing doubts" about the credibility of some crime labs in the state, particularly in Houston, where massive problems were discovered earlier this year.
In their resolution, Travis County officials asked for appointment of a nonpartisan, blue-ribbon commission to study administration of capital punishment in Texas and make recommendations to the next Legislature.
Rep. Harold Dutton, D-Houston, has filed legislation to impose a moratorium on the death penalty and set up a state commission to study capital punishment in Texas. In filing the bill, the lawmaker called the current situation in Texas "shameful."
The measure was given a public hearing in a House committee last month, but it was left pending and will not be acted on in the current legislative session, which ends June 2.
Terrence Stutz is based in the Austin Bureau of The Dallas Morning News.
E-mail tstutz@dallasnews.com
Austin American-Statesman, April 30, 2003
Taking a small poke at a rock solid Texas institution, the Travis County Commissioners Court on Tuesday called on the Legislature to order a temporary halt to executions in the state.
By a 3-1 vote, the court made Travis the first Texas county to pass a resolution alleging flaws in the administration of the death penalty and to urge a moratorium and an in-depth study of the system.
"The moratorium is the right thing to do," County Judge Sam Biscoe said before the vote. He later said he supports the death penalty if there is no doubt that it is being administered fairly but doesn't believe that is happening.
State Rep. Terry Keel, R-Austin, a former Travis County sheriff and former assistant district attorney who prosecuted two death penalty cases in the county, said the resolution is "even more silly than the (Austin) City Council's resolution against the war."
"The decision to prosecute capital crimes is made at the county level. The imposition of capital punishment is made at the county level in the Travis County Courthouse by juries summoned by the county," Keel said. "In light of this, such a political statement coming from a county commissioners court is absurdity."
Commissioner Gerald Daugherty, the lone Republican on the county's primary governing board, voted no, and Commissioner Karen Sonleitner abstained.
The Commissioners Court sets the budget of the district attorney's office, but Biscoe said there are no plans to alter funding and said the resolution he sponsored is not meant to be an indictment of local prosecutors.
District Attorney Ronnie Earle declined to comment. The Travis County district attorney's office prosecuted six of the 450 people on death row and five of the 302 who have been executed in Texas since the death penalty resumed in 1976.
Texas leads the nation in the use of the death penalty, accounting for more than one-third of executions during that time.
With the evolution of DNA testing and the subsequent exoneration of some of those wrongly convicted, concern about the fairness of the system that executes people has swelled.
The issue was thrust forward in Texas last winter when media reports and a subsequent audit of the police crime lab in Houston threw into question evidence used in hundreds of convictions in Harris County, including some involving the death penalty.
Last month, Houston Mayor Lee Brown asked Gov. Rick Perry for a moratorium on the death penalty in some Harris County cases until new DNA testing could be completed. Perry refused Brown's request.
Proponents of a statewide moratorium cited Houston in appealing to the Commissioners Court on Tuesday.
"How much confidence can we have in any of the labs at this point?" said David Atwood of the Texas Moratorium Network, a group that advocates a moratorium.
It is believed that the only local government statewide to pass a similar resolution is the tiny City of Hays, with 250 people, in northern Hays County. The City Council passed a resolution 2-1 in 2001, Council Member Harvey Davis said.
Several attempts to secure a resolution requesting a state moratorium in a large city or county have failed, Atwood said.
El Paso County commissioners briefly passed a resolution similar to Travis' in December, but they repealed it the same day after the county's district attorney objected. A week later, family members of victims of violent crimes gave passionate testimony to commissioners, and the resolution was never brought to a vote again.
The resolution approved in Travis County alleges a number of problems with the system that convicts and kills people in Texas, including racial and socioeconomic factors in the imposition of death sentences and the absence of uniform procedures to ensure equality in the use of capital punishment from county to county.
"We seem to take life very lightly . . . that it's OK to execute great numbers of people, and that bothers me," Commissioner Margaret Gmez said.
After the meeting, Daugherty refused to comment on his vote.
Sonleitner said she has no doubt about the justice process in Travis County and couldn't vote yes because of the memory of the county's victims of violent crime, about whom she learned during her years covering crime and courts as a television news reporter.
"These are people I did not know, but I got to know through their families and friends," she said, her voice cracking with emotion after she recited names of more than a dozen murder victims.
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