End of Month: URGENT Actions/Events: Gregory Wright: Reprieve Appeal/Exonerees & More Events in Texas ...

Greg Wright with his wife Connie during their June, 7, 2008 visit

Please keep coming back right here & be sure to read to the end of this post &/or scroll if you've already seen & acted on Wright's appeal. Other Events will be Posted under this Amnesty I/USA Urgent Action Appeal (which only takes but a couple of minutes) Since there are so many other events of keen interest to all abolitionists and the JOH, we will keep them posted here...let us know if we miss any?
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APPEAL FOR GREGORY WRIGHT

Even if you have already sent a clemency letter (or signed a petition seeking reprieve for Gregory Wright) please send another via the Amnesty International USA website.

Here is how this letter reads:

lPlease grant clemency for Gregory Wright. Mr. Wright is scheduled to be executed on October 30 for the 1997 murder of Donna Vick. On the day of the murder, March 21, 1997, John Adams went to a Dallas video store and instructed the shop assistant to call the police, because he wanted to turn himself in for committing murder in nearby Desoto. Adams was arrested, but he gave a statement declaring that Wright stabbed Vick to death.

On June 21, 2008, Adams signed a statement declaring, “I want the record clear that Greg Wright is innocent of the crime he’s here on death row for. If you kill him your [sic] killing a innocent man.” In a follow-up statement dated August 6, 2008, Adams said that he, not Wright, killed Vick. Adams said he had blamed Wright to get the murder “off [his] hands,” but that his newly found religious conviction was leading him to confess. Another Texas death row inmate has signed a statement declaring that Adams “has told me several times that he panicked and was scared [after the crime] and that [Gregory Wright] did not kill the lady.”

Wright’s lawyers were never given a tape of the call made by the video store employee to the police on the day of the murder. Additionally, prosecutors failed to disclose the employee’s whereabouts to Wright’s lawyers, though affidavits submitted by the employee suggest that they knew where he was living at the time of Wright’s trial. Wright’s lawyers were also not made aware of the existence of another witness, who signed affidavits in 2001 stating that he had been with Adams when Adams admitted to killing Vick.

Furthermore, though prosecutors linked Wright to Vick’s murder via articles found in a shack where Wright sometimes stayed, Wright’s lawyers were not made aware until after the trial began that letters belonging to Adams were also taken from the shack. The lawyers assert that, had they known of these letters, they would have used them to refute that prosecution’s claim that the shack’s contents were solely Wright’s property. Also, preliminary DNA testing shows that blood on a pair of jeans taken from the shack matches Adams’.

Finally, in closing arguments at Wright’s trial, prosecutors focused on the bloody fingerprint found on a pillowcase in Vick’s bedroom. This partial fingerprint was the only physical evidence directly linking Wright to Vick’s murder. However, prosecutors had not called two detectives that failed to identify the print as Wright’s to testify. Instead, they called a retired print examiner, who testified that the prints on the pillowcase matched Wright’s. This suggests that prosecutors “witness shopped.” Moreover, since Wright’s trial, two forensic scientists have signed affidavits that the fingerprint lacked sufficient detail or clarity to be identifiable to anyone, let alone Wright.

We strongly urge you to demonstrate your respect for justice and human life by doing everything in your power to commute the death sentence of Gregory Wright, and support a moratorium on executions in Texas. Thank you for your time and attention to this serious matter.

To Sign this Letter, please take two minutes to go to the Amnesty Site:
here

PPS: donations, however small, are desperately needed for legal and/or funeral expenses--You can offer such support: » here
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AUSTIN, TEXAS

Witness to Innocence Exonerates and other members will be in Austin, Texas for our largest ever seminar from Thursday Oct 30th to Sunday Nov. 2.

Talk about the belly of the beast! We will be there as Death Star State has accelerated it's extermination of lesser human beings at the rate of two per week. The average in Texas is usually 24 executions per year with the one year record going to Geo W. at a heart stopping rate of 25.

Keep in mind the fact that for every 8 people executed, One is exonerated. How many people would put their kids on a school bus if they knew that the kid had a 1 in 8 chance of dying before reaching the school. Then the kid still has a return trip with the same odds. You bet your ass that the government would be all over it with investigations, studies, and immediate moratorium on all buses.

Yet with these same odds of one in eight we trust our government to decide who lives and who they get to kill. Knowing all along that mistakes are made and many of these errors are the cognizant actions of corrupt prosecutors. As Juan Melendez says in the book Executioners doorstep "We need to pass legislation to hold prosecutors and investigators accountable who proceed with a death penalty case when they know they have an innocent man on their hands."

I find it astonishing that two thirds of all death penalty cases are overturned because of prosecutorial misconduct and still the voting populace and the Supreme Court have no problem with it.

As we of Witness to Innocence launch our incursion into the state of Texas, we hope to be well in the face of the Arrogant, Smug, and Moronic proponents of the death penalty. This is the same state that executed Carlos De Luna on Dec. 7th 1989, Rubin Cantu on August 24 1993 and Todd Willingham on Feb 17 2004 knowing fully that all three of these men were innocent.

On Friday afternoon Oct. 31st. we will be doing a large press conference at the state capitol where we expect to be a powerful witness. I encourage all our Texas abolitionists and friends to attend.

When when we speak out in Texas, I promise you we will be loud. I just hope they listen.

Ron Keine

To the living we owe respect. To the dead we owe the truth . Voltaire

I firmly believe that every man, woman and child on this earth No matter what their race, color, ethnicity, religion or political preferences has the right and is entitled---- to my opinion. ---- Ron Keine