The Prisoners Defense Committee
405 W. Lubbock . San Antonio, TX 78204
Texas death row inmate has won her claim in the 5th Federal Circuit Court in New Orleans
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
For the Fifth Circuit
No. 98-20653
PAMELA LYNN PERILLO,
Petitioner-Appellee,
VERSUS
GARY L. JOHNSON, DIRECTOR, TEXAS DEPARTMENT
OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE, INSTITUTIONAL DIVISION,
Respondent-Appellant.
Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Southern District of Texas
March 2, 2000
Before SMITH, EMILIO M. GARZA, and DeMOSS, Circuit Judges.
DeMOSS, Circuit Judge.Gary Johnson, the Director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Institutional Division, ("the Director") appeals the district court's final judgment granting Pamela Perillo's 28 U.S.C. � 2254 petition for habeas corpus relief. The district court determined that Perillo's trial counsel labored under an actual conflict of interest that adversely affected counsel's presentation of Perillo's defense on the issues of both guilt and punishment at her 1980 trial. The district court therefore vacated the criminal judgment against Perillo, both as to her conviction and her death sentence, and ordered that Perillo be released unless the State of Texas elected to retry her within 120 days of the date upon which the district court's decision became final. After an exhaustive review of the unique factual scenario presented in this case, we affirm.
(this is a lengthy decision, and the remainder can be seen at: Perillo)
******************************While I am glad to see Charles Terrell Sr. reconsider his stance on the death penalty, his letter (Mar.2) contains misleading information.
Texas does NOT have an alternative sentence of life without parole. The harshest sentence someone could face in a capital case short of death is a mandatory 40 year sentence with parole only as an option at the end of time served.
Only as of Sept. 1999 could Texas juries be told that the 40-year sentence was an option; before that, we had uninformed juries sentencing people to death because they were NOT told what sentencing alternatives existed. Juries across America use LWOP at a 3-1 ratio over the death penatly when given the choice.
And Mr. Terrell bemoans the fact that lethal injection "doesn't send the same message or fear as the electric chair, hanging or the gas chamber." America moved away from those methods because of the grisly spectacles of botched executions, deciding that they no longer fit into a national "evolving standard of decency."
Neither does lethal injection. This method of killing was invented and first used by Dr. Karl Brandt, the personal physician of Adolf Hitler, in 1939, against "defective" children in Austria and Germany. Lethal injection today remains what it was when invented by the Nazis: medicalized killing made easy for the executioners. It is outrageous to view lethal injection as "humane."
Society should be protected from its violent offenders. We just do not have to kill people to do it.
Rick Halperin
Amnesty International
Dallas
(source: Letter to the editor, Dallas Morning News)
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