Posted on 02/15/2004 9:41:55 AM PST by Houmatt
Sometimes, as the hands of the clock that tops Huntsville's Walls Unit death house inch toward execution time, anti-capital punishment crusader David Atwood has a vision. In it, a sinister locomotive crashes through the night, dealing death despite frenzied efforts to stop it.
The out-of-control locomotive is the state's killing machine, Atwood said, and it has rolled unchecked since executions resumed in Texas 22 years ago. Since then, 319 executions have taken place, six of them in 2004.
"Texas is tough," Atwood acknowledged recently. "It will take a tremendous amount of energy to stop the locomotive. It will take millions of people. It will take more than activists -- it will take community leaders and corporation presidents who recognize the death penalty is wrong."
At 63, the soft-spoken, silver-haired Atwood, a retired Houston chemical engineer, is the patriarch of Texas' anti-death penalty movement. In 1995, he founded the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, a group that has grown from a dozen execution opponents meeting occasionally in members' homes to roughly 350 dues-paying members statewide.
The organization now has chapters in Houston, Austin, Dallas, El Paso, San Antonio and several smaller cities. It dispatches anti-death penalty speakers across the state.
In Texas, where more than 75 percent of residents favor the death penalty, the coalition is nothing if not embattled.
On city sidewalks and on death row, in churches, classrooms and legislative chambers, its members relentlessly warn that a state that kills its killers risks nurturing a culture of violence. The death penalty, they argue, represents vengeance. It fails to deter crime. It unjustly targets blacks and Hispanics.
"Ours is primarily an education organization," said Atwood, a proponent of life sentences without parole. "We give talks. We do that from the perspective that when the average Texan really becomes educated, he will not be in favor of capital punishment. What I find is a lot of misconceptions ... motivated by misinformation and fear."
At least some observers believe the movement has gained ground. They cite the U.S. Supreme Court's 2002 ban on executing mentally retarded killers and a recent agreement to review issues surrounding the execution of murderers who committed their crimes as juveniles.
"Great strides have been made, even in this state," said Rick Halperin, a Dallas Amnesty International official who two years ago replaced Atwood as coalition president.
Atwood, he said, "sees the big evolutionary picture in this state and in this country."
A Maine native who for most of his life was more interested in playing golf than social activism, Atwood came to Houston in 1971 when his employer, Shell Oil Co., transferred its headquarters to Texas.
Once in Texas, Atwood, a devout Catholic, found himself drawn into activism through a religious awakening.
"My faith was deepening during this period. I really developed a strong prayer life, even to the point of going to New Mexico and spending a month in a monastery," he said. " ... I came to believe in the sanctity of human life. I came to a very solid belief in the whole idea of one human family -- a human family regardless of their race or economic status or their ethnic background."
Atwood's faith found an outlet in practice as he and his wife, a registered nurse, joined an ecumenical group in operating a medical clinic in a poor, inner-city neighborhood.
In the early 1990s, Atwood, serving on a church committee that provided funds for social service projects, was approached by a Houston nun seeking funds for a newsletter to be written by death row inmates.
Although more than 50 executions had taken place during his years of religious activism, the death penalty, Atwood conceded, "just wasn't on my radar."
"I really got into a research project to find out what was going on in the world, what was going on in the United States," he said.
What Atwood learned -- Harris County's leadership in condemning murderers and Texas' leadership in killing them -- left him appalled. Although the nation's Catholic bishops officially opposed capital punishment as early as 1980, Atwood found little organized opposition to the death penalty inside or outside the church.
He launched a letter-writing campaign to Catholic and secular newspapers. Then he and a few other death penalty opponents decided to hold informal meetings "just to talk."
"It was a ragtag group," he recalled. "People came from every different background."
While other executions fueled the fledging coalition's fervor, it was the case of Conroe janitor Clarence Brandley, freed from prison after spending almost a decade on death row, that convinced the activists of the importance of their work.
Brandley, convicted in 1981 of raping and murdering a high school cheerleader, faced execution until a state district judge ruled his conviction had been tainted by racial prejudice, perjured testimony and witness intimidation. The Texas Court of Appeals upheld the ruling in 1990.
Although cases such as Brandley's underscore the wrongness of the death penalty for Atwood, the activist holds no illusions about the innocence of most death row inmates. "Most of them are guilty of the most horrible crimes," he said. "They have caused such suffering."
In his years of visiting death row inmates, he has found only three who convinced him of their innocence: Odell Barnes Jr., executed in March 2000 for the 1989 robbery-rape-murder of a Wichita Falls woman; Gary Graham, executed in June 2000 for the 1981 robbery-murder of a Tuscon, Ariz., man at a north Houston supermarket; and Richard Jones, executed in August 2000 for the abduction-murder of a Tarrant County woman.
Still, Atwood believes, even the most horrific killers retain their humanity. Karla Faye Tucker, the Houston ax murderer whose February 1998 execution stirred international controversy, "could have made a major contribution," Atwood said.
"She could have said, `Don't do what I did.' ... She could have helped many women make the right decisions."
Such efforts, though, do not appease critics such as Dianne Clements, president of the victims rights group Justice for All.
"David Atwood publicly professes compassion for families of murder victims, then paints a picture of these families that is hurtful," Clements said. "If someone has a position that's different from Dave Atwood's, he will dismiss their hurt, their grief, their support of the criminal justice system as vengeful."
Despite his "bedrock commitment" to life's sanctity, Atwood admitted some crimes are so horrendous that he momentarily wavers.
The recent slaying of 11-year-old Carlie Brucia is one of those cases. Media coverage of the Sarasota, Fla., girl's abduction as she walked home from a friend's house left Atwood unspeakably saddened, he said.
"Sometimes a killer is such a horrible person that I wonder if he shouldn't be executed. But the answer is always the same: `No,' " Atwood said. " ... Sometimes, though, this is hard work."
Odell Barnes? Richard Jones? Gary Graham? INNOCENT?!?
ROTFLMAO!!!
Choo-choo! Keep that coal coming.
That is just plain dumb. Anyone who doesn't know that you shouldn't kill someone with a pick-ax to get a thrill should not be out in society anyway. And how many women would want too?
I think it is nice that she became a Christian in prison. But that has diddly to do with the fact that she murdered a guy.
Hmmm, I wonder how many victims these less-than-animal creatures murdered between them?
I'm sorry, but d*ckheads like this fool nauseate me.
If he loves sick, soulless, cruel thugs and murderers so much, let him go live with them, pay for their endless appeals, or invite them to live in his house.
A glaring example of how misplaced, ignorant "compassion" causes just as much evil as regular evil.
Meanwhile, 3000 innocent children are murdered in the abortuaries of this nation every single day.
But perhaps the lives of these criminals are somehow more important, to him at least.
Hmmm, I wonder how many victims these less-than-animal creatures murdered between them?
***** ***** *****
In 1995, he founded the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, a group that has grown from a dozen execution opponents meeting occasionally in members' homes to roughly 350 dues-paying members statewide.
Shoot, the least the Texians could do is execute 31 more right away, so each of the TCADP members could feel personally responsible for one each!
If he loves sick, soulless, cruel thugs and murderers so much, let him go live with them, pay for their endless appeals, or invite them to live in his house.
Aw, c'mon. Let's try to accept his point of view, at least in one small part:
If someone murders David Atwood, give 'em a couple of years in jail, and then let 'em go. No harm, no foul.
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