1980: TX Courts order new trial of murder suspect. 2013: Suspect still waiting.

[Ideologue]

silent Hunter

Fuck you.

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

You know you've played too much silent Hunter when your reaction to a battleship picture is trying to estimate AoB to get a firing solution.

Or you are sitting in a waterfront restaurant in Seattle estimating the width of Puget Sound by estimating the distance to a ferry using its mast height.

[Iormlund]

For some reason I didn't have much success estimating distances with in-game tools. Fortunately you could usually make do with AoB and speed. AoB I guessed and speed was easy to determine if you set course to some place in front of the target and noted the time it took it to cross the vertical line in the scope.

[The Minsky Moment]

Interesting story, which is a bit more complicated than the journalistic blurbs might suggest (no surprise).

Hartfield was convicted of murdering a woman at a bus station and sentenced to death.  On appeal, his attorney claimed that the trial court committed error by striking from the jury (for cause) a prospective juror who expressed some unease about the death penalty,  but stated that she would answer jury questions based on the evidence.  Under the standards applied by the US Supreme Court at that time, Texas could not apply the death penalty to Hatfield without violating the Constitution.  Texas could either reduce the sentence to life imprisonment or order a new trial.   However, Texas courts at that time did not have the power to commute sentences on their own authority.  The options available to the prosecution were either to convince the court to change its mind on the constitutional question in a rehearing or to get the governor to commute the setence.  So in October 1980 the prosecutors made a motion for a rehearing and in the alternative sought additional time to make a commutation request to the governor.  The court granted the rehearing request a month later.

It is at this point that the problem for the prosecutors arose.  Because they had an opportunity for a rehearing that might have affirmed the death penalty conviction, they didn't take advantage of the alternative of getting the governor to commute the sentence.  The rehearing didn't take place for until 1983.  The State lost, and the appeals court reaffirmed the ruling calling for a new trial.  At that point, the prosecutors ran to the governor and got him to commute Hartfield's sentence to life.  Problem  was - Hartfield's conviction had been vacated back in 1980 and the time to commute passed back then.  By 1983, it was too late to solve this problem via commutation of sentence.

IMO it would not be unfair to characterize this as a technicality.  There was no constitutional problem with Hartfield's conviction, just the sentence of death.  And the governor did fix the sentencing problem by commuting him to life.  Unfortunately for Texas, the fix was not timely.  And that matters.  Defendants lose appeal rights all the time for failing to comply with strict and sometimes arcane timing rules.  Under the rule of law, it is essential that the states be held to the same standards of conduct. 

None this background excuses what is happening currently - Texas now knows there is no way that they can lawfully convict and hold Hartfield, but continue to put procedural roadblocks in his way just for the purpose of delay.