Stop the execution of Innocent woman, FreeFrances.org part2

[hiley]

Frances Elaine Newton
could soon be the first African American woman executed in modern Texas history despite resounding questions of whether she is guilty and whether she received a fair trial.

Almost half of those on Texas' death row are African American, yet they are only 12 per cent of the population. Newton is from Harris County, where the Houston Police Crime Lab has botched so many cases that even the police chief and a state senator have asked the governor to halt executions from Harris County.
March and Rally in Austin
Saturday, August 27
*** URGENT ***
18 DAYS
TO SAVE FRANCES

An execution date has been set again:
September 14, 2005.

NOW: e-mail multiple selected elected officials at ONCE !!!
or
Send mail in old-fashioned ways
http://www.freefrances.org/

From DemocracyNow!

Two Dutch journalists recently interviewed the state prosecutor in charge of Newton's case. In that interview, Assistant District Attorney Roe Wilson contradicted a key piece of evidence that led to Newton's conviction. While prosecutors linked one gun to Newton, it now appears that there was a second gun that was never tested in a crime lab.

Texas leads the nation in the number of executions performed since the moratorium on capital punishment was lifted in 1974. Almost half of the people on death row in Texas are African-American though only 12 percent of the population is. And in Harris County, where Frances Newton is from, the police crime lab is notorious for botching capital cases.

Another hurdle in Newton's case was her state-appointed attorney. She was originally represented by the infamous defense attorney Ron Mock, who has lost so many capital cases that he is known as "death row Mock." At least sixteen of Mock's clients have gone to death row and he has never won an acquittal in a capital case. He has been suspended from the bar twice. A colleague in Frances Newton's case says Mock told her that he had not thoroughly examined the evidence. In another high profile capital case, Mock is known to have fallen asleep while defending Shaka Sankofa, or Gary Graham, in court.

Transcript of DemocracyNow!with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales

AMY GOODMAN: What is the key issue that you feel needs to be raised right now for people to understand about Frances Newton?

DAVID DOW: Well, I think that there are really three key issues, and two of them are more important legally than the third, even though that's -- that's ironic, because the issue that I think people need to understand that we're certainly including in everything that we file but that is very difficult to raise at this stage of her case is simply the fact that she's innocent and the fact that there isn't any evidence that suggests that she was guilty.

Essentially, the state had three pieces of evidence at her trial. It had the motive evidence, which was the claim that she had purchased life insurance and then killed her family in order to collect that money. And it had two pieces of physical evidence; one piece of physical evidence was the presence of nitrite particles on the lower portion of the skirt that she was wearing on that night. And nitrite particles can come from gunpowder residue. And then the final piece of evidence was the gun. The state claimed that the gun that Frances Newton took out of the house, the gun that you just heard her talking about, was the murder weapon. Those are the three pieces of evidence.
snip---

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/25/1342238

Dec. 2, 2004, 11:03PM

Mock gone, not mockery
By RICK CASEY
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle
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Missing eyewitnesses
The disgraced crime lab is one problem. Having the legendary Ron Mock appointed as her attorney is another. Consider the following, from Newton's case and beyond:

•The attorney appointed to assist Mock in defending Newton, Catherine Coulter, gave sworn testimony that Mock told her he had thoroughly checked out the evidence in the case, but later confessed he had not. Days before the trial, Mock admitted at a hearing that he had not interviewed any witnesses or filed any motions in the case.
•Mock admitted to a reporter he flunked criminal law in law school.
•In the highly publicized Gary Graham case, his client was sentenced to death by the testimony of a single eyewitness. Yet two witnesses who were named in police reports were not called by Mock. Both said Graham was not the killer. An investigator hired by Mock for the case said he and Mock assumed Graham, who had a violent criminal history, was guilty. Mock denied this.
•For years judges gave Mock an inordinate number of capital and other cases. In the early 1990s, he racked up fees of more than $70,000 a year for as many as 40 trials annually. He never won an acquittal in a capital case. At least 16 Mock clients have gone to Death Row. Four, including Newton, are still there.
•While conducting jury selection in the trial of John Westley, Mock was arrested. An appeals court found him in contempt for repeatedly missing deadlines for filings on behalf of another client. In another case, a judge removed Mock as attorney for a death-row inmate after learning he was three months late in filing an appeals brief. In at least four other cases, defendants asked to dismiss Mock, but were not allowed to do so.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/casey/2929494

Fight to stop Texas woman's execution
Richard Luscombe in Miami
Friday August 26, 2005
The Guardian
Texas is preparing to execute the first black woman in the state since the American civil war - drawing protests from her supporters and opponents of the US death penalty.
Frances Newton, 40, was convicted of murdering her husband and two children in 1987 for a $100,000 (£55,000) insurance payout. Her campaigners say she is innocent, but supporters of capital punishment point out that she has lost several appeals.

If she is given a lethal injection next month as planned, she will be the first African-American woman to be executed in Texas since the civil war ended in 1865, and only the second in the country since capital punishment resumed in 1977.
snip--
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1556667,00.html
Lawyers fight execution of black woman in Texas
By Jeff Franks
Fri Aug 26, 4:27 PM ET

snip--
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Amnesty International have appealed for Newton to be spared. Her supporters have held protests in Houston and plan another on Saturday at the Texas Capitol in Austin.

'WRONGLY ACCUSED, WRONGLY CONVICTED'

"For a long time I believed in the death penalty. But now I know that the system can't be trusted to be right. I've been wrongly accused, wrongly convicted," Newton told the Houston Chronicle in an interview.

snip--
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050826/ts_nm/execution_texas_dc

[Catherine Vincent]

1. Done!

:hi:

[hiley]

3. Thank you cat_girl25

Frances is so innocent!

[wli]

2. another victim of Bushler's COINTELPRO holocaust n/t

[hiley]

4. ...

Sondra Nelms, who was with Frances Newton immediately after she was supposed to have shot her husband and children, has signed an affidavit expanding on her trial testimony. She describes Frances Newton’s shock and horror at finding the bodies (a reaction confirmed by the police at the scene) and concludes that "I
know in my heart that after watching the reaction of Frances upon discovering her husband and children, there is absolutely no way she had any involvement in their deaths."

Texas accounts for 336 of the 944 executions carried out in the USA since 1977, 81 of whom were prosecuted in Harris County. Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all cases, regardless of guilt or innocence. Since 1973, 117 people have been released from US death rows after evidence of their innocence emerged. Others have gone to their deaths despite serious doubts about their guilt.
snip---

http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR511632004
September 14, 2005: Execution of Frances Newton

New Evidence featured in New York Times article
email a bunch of public officials with the new mass-emailer.
Attend the meeting this Wednesday.
The Committee to Free Frances Newton meets every Wednesday at 6:30 PM at Hitaji's Sacred Space, 2620 Fountainview, Suite 113. Punch in "113" on the box and the door will open.
Harris County Courthouse, 1201 Franklin Street between 11:00 AM and1:00PM on Monday: prayer vigil.
There are 10,000 postcards to the governor that need to be distributed and signed
March and protest in Austin on Saturday, August 27.
Checks can be made out to "Abolition Movement" and mailed to 2620 Fountainview, Suite 113, Houston, TX 77057. Write "For Frances" on the memo line.
snip---
http://houston.indymedia.org/archives/archive_by_id.php?id=535&category_id=1

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/25/national/25execute.html
http://www.freefrances.org/francesnewtoncampaign.html

[Name removed]

5. Deleted message

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[Catherine Vincent]

6. Be gone ya troll!