Word: houston
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...same. As Charlie Brooks waited to be injected, a crowd of 300 gathered to celebrate. Some of the pro-execution revelers, mostly college students, carried placards; KILL 'EM IN VEIN, said one. "Most of the people I know are for capital punishment," declared Paula Huffman, 21, a Sam Houston State University senior at the deathwatch. "And so am I. Definitely." Nevertheless, when the moment arrived, just after midnight, she and the rest of her shivering, smiling chums suddenly turned quiet and grave...
...time of Furman it was widely recognized that the system was unquestionably stacked against black defendants, especially in the "death belt" of the South. Some of the racism has been wrung out. Yet clear bias remains, much attributable to prosecutorial choices. A recent study of homicide cases in Houston's Harris County is troubling. In cases where a black or Chicano had killed a white, 65% of defendants were tried for capital murder; only 25% of whites who killed a black or Chicano faced the death penalty. "I don't think it's overt racism," says University...
Texas law-enforcement officials and Claude Wilkerson, 28, agree on one point: when the murder for which he was later tried, convicted and sentenced to death took place, Wilkerson was locked up in Houston's Harris County jail. Beyond that incontrovertible fact stretches a tangle of contradictions. Two of Wilkerson's confederates have been tried for the same murder and now face execution. A fourth man, who admitted being present at the scene of the crime, is serving a life sentence, a leniency granted for his cooperation with investigators. Says Wilkerson from his cell on Texas' death...
...science class we took a straw poll on the subject of capital punishment, I voted in favor of it." Wilkerson dropped out of Mesa College in Colorado after one year, married, divorced and knocked about in a couple of ill-fated business schemes. He then went to work for Houston Businessman Don Fantich, who local police suspected was an operator in the penumbra of the underworld...
...Fantich disappeared, along with a woman who ran a jewelry store, which Fantich owned, and an apparently innocent bystander, Dr. William Fitzpatrick. Police picked up Wilkerson for questioning. While he was in custody, all three missing persons were shot and buried about 100 miles west of Houston. From testimony pieced together from a variety of sources, police found the bodies and deduced that the victims were part of an extortion and kidnaping scheme that Wilkerson had masterminded. While Wilkerson owned up to the plot, he denied any involvement in the murders. Prosecutor Don Stricklin scoffs at this: "He could have...