Another killer of citizens--Bush got the ball rolling on this particular killing field. I sure hope, for people, New Mexico wins its claim and reduces the size of Texas. Here's more grim news.
Texas set to execute 300th inmate
March 13 2003
In the 22 years since convicted killer Delma Banks arrived on death row in Texas, he's seen 299 prisoners taken away for execution.
Barring a US Supreme Court reprieve, he'll become No. 300.
"You're talking to men, one day they move them out and they don't return," Banks, 44, recently told the Houston Chronicle.
Banks, condemned for a fatal shooting near Texarkana 23 years ago, was scheduled to be executed late last night, local time. The appeal of his case to the Supreme Court, though, has drawn support of three former federal judges, including former FBI Director William Sessions.
The former judges say problems with lawyers and witnesses in Banks' trial led to a wrongful conviction.
In spending more than half of his life awaiting lethal injection, Banks has been on death row longer than the 16-year-old victim in his case was alive.
"I'm terribly upset it's gone on for this long period of time," says Larry Whitehead, whose son, Richard Wayne Whitehead, was gunned down in 1980.
"It's very frustrating and very hard on us and has been for the fact this keeps coming back up."
Texas carried out its 299th execution since the state restored the death penalty in 1982 when Bobby Glen Cook received a lethal injection Tuesday night.
He had been condemned in the death of Edwin Holder, who was robbed and shot in 1993 while he slept along a river.
Texas accounts for more than one-third of the 835 executions in the United States since 1976, when the death penalty resumed under a Supreme Court ruling. Virginia is a distant second with 87.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused to block Banks' execution earlier this week, and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles dismissed a petition for commutation and reprieve because it was filed too late.
Banks' lawyers argue that their client's trial lawyer did a lousy job, prosecutors improperly disqualified blacks from his jury and two witnesses against Banks were shaky.
"We are confident that the United States Supreme Court will intervene and prevent Mr Banks' execution," said one of Banks' lawyers, George Kendall, an lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defence Fund. "Mr Banks' case is fraught with the kind of unreliability that we know leads to wrongful convictions."
In an accompanying brief to the high court, Sessions complained of "uncured constitutional errors in the process through which (Banks) was convicted and sentenced."
Richard Wayne Whitehead, from the Texarkana suburb of Wake Village, worked with Banks at a restaurant.
The night of April 11, 1980, Banks ran into Whitehead and his girlfriend after a high school dance. Banks, then 21, bought some beer and the three went to a park.
Banks and Whitehead took the girl home and then returned to the park, where Whitehead was shot in the head - "for the hell of it," Banks said, according to testimony at his trial.
"I have no doubt at all, none at all that he is the murderer," said James Elliott, a prosecutor at Banks' 1980 trial. "I take absolute and full responsibility for my part in this case in placing him on death row."
Elliott said Banks, who is black, had an all-white trial jury because blacks in the jury pool had to be excused for knowing Banks or his family.
He said Banks' trial lawyer was the county's former district attorney who was competent to handle the case, and he said witnesses tied Banks to the crime other than the one who submitted an affidavit recanting his trial testimony.
AP
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