Texas executes man who killed his family

The 3rd Execution of 2020

Less than an hour after the courts denied his final appeal, Abel Revill Ochoa, a Texas man who killed five people became the state’s second prisoner in 2020 executed, reported the Houston Chronicle.

With his last words, Ochoa thanked Jesus for his salvation and apologized to his victims’ families.

“I would like to thank God, my dad, my Lord Jesus savior for saving me and changing my life,” he said, strapped to the Huntsville gurney. “I want to apologize to my in-laws for causing all this emotional pain. I love y’all and consider y’all my sister I never had. I want to thank you for forgiving me.”

He died at 6:48 p.m., 18 years after the crime that landed him on death row.

When police initially arrested him years earlier, Ochoa said he couldn’t handle the stress and had simply gotten tired of his life. So he’d killed his family.

The then-30-year-old Dallas man cooperated with police from the start, and confessed to the five murders, ultimately blaming his violent outburst on the drugs he’d smoked less than half an hour earlier.

“My body started wanting more crack,” he told police, according to news reports at the time. “I knew if I asked my wife for more money, she wouldn’t let me have it. I knew she’d argue with me about the money, just like we had in the past.”

A jury found him guilty in just 10 minutes, and in 2003 sentenced him to death. Many of his later appeals centered on claims he didn’t have good enough legal representation earlier in the case, but in the final days before his Thursday execution he raised claims about parole board procedures and the prison’s reluctance to let him film a clemency plea.

Born in Mexico, Ochoa was raised by a father who beat him with sticks and branches but, he later told the court, “not a lot.”

In the early 1990s, Ochoa married his wife Cecilia and settled in a home in South Dallas, according to Associated Press reports. It was a volatile relationship, with occasional separations. Then sometime around 2000 Ochoa became addicted to drugs, financing a crack habit with an illegal loan scheme, according to court records.

One Sunday in August two years later, Ochoa went to church with his family. On the way home, he asked his wife for money to buy drugs. She gave in, and he bought a $10 rock of crack, according to court records. He went out back to smoke it, then walked into the bedroom — and came back out with a 9mm handgun. He walked into the living room, where he systematically shot his wife, their 9-month-old daughter Anahi, his father-in-law Bartolo and his sisters-in-law Alma and Jackie. He then walked into the kitchen and shot his 7-year-old daughter Crystal four times.

Only Alma survived.

Afterward, Ochoa got in his wife’s Toyota 4Runner and drove away. When police stopped and arrested him minutes later at a nearby shopping center, he told the officer where he’d left the gun and gave a detailed written confession.

“He said he remembers it like a dream,” his brother Gilbert told a Dallas-Fort Worth TV station the next day. “He was doing that drug outside and then he went into the living room.”

When the case went to trial, his lawyers argued that he’d committed the slayings in a cocaine-induced delirium, and that he had poor impulse control due to frontal lobe damage from drug use.

Prosecutors argued that he’d simply acted out of anger.

After he was convicted and sent to death row, Ochoa filed appeals accusing his trial team of shoddy work. The defense investigator responsible for learning about Ochoa’s life and uncovering reasons to spare him didn’t speak the same language as many of the witnesses she was supposed to interview, he argued to a federal court. The judge had only approved her appointment at the last minute, and the trial attorneys didn’t ask for more time until it was too late.

But a federal district court decided that it wasn’t clear more investigating would “substantially improve” Ochoa’s chances of success, and a federal appeals court said Ochoa’s attorneys were “simply seeking to ‘turn over every stone’” when they asked for the time and money to get another investigator.

“No stones, in fact, have been turned over, because of the lack of funds,” Ochoa’s lawyers wrote. “Far from quality representation, Mr. Ochoa has only had counsel deprived of any means to effectuate his representation.”

The U.S. Supreme Court turned down Ochoa’s case in October 2019, but on Wednesday his attorneys tried again in the high court. This time, his legal team wrote that he wanted to send the parole board a video plea for clemency - but the prison system at first wouldn’t let his lawyers film him without a court order. Reporters are often allowed to film interviews, and Ochoa’s lawyers took issue with the prison’s initial reluctance to allow them the same access.

After Ochoa’s death, seven more Texas executions already are on the calendar for 2020.

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Tulsa, OK looks for bodies from huge 1921 racist massacre

Archaeologists plan to excavate part of a cemetery in Tulsa, Okla., to see if it holds the remains of black residents slaughtered by white mobs during a massacre in 1921—according to The New York Times, one of the worst instances of racist violence in U.S. history.

The mayor said it was an “unprecedented” step to address one of the worst instances of racist violence in American history, an episode that for decades was rarely acknowledged in public by city leaders.

The archaeologists plan to dig up a small section of the Oaklawn Cemetery, east of downtown, where they found evidence last year of a possible mass grave site. The excavation, announced at a committee meeting on Monday, “would establish the presence or absence of human remains, determine the nature of the interments, and obtain data to help inform the future steps in the investigation, including appropriate recovery efforts,” the city said in a statement.

“We are proposing this intermediate step to obtain just a sample and additional information — essentially a proof of concept, if you will — to demonstrate: ‘Do we, in fact, have human remains here? And do they seem to be consistent with race massacre victims?’” Dr. Kary Stackelbeck, the state archaeologist of Oklahoma, said at the meeting.

Previous investigations have identified possible locations for the mass graves and compiled historical evidence of the massacre, which for decades was rarely mentioned in textbooks or publicly acknowledged by white city officials. The excavation, which is slated for April, raises the tantalizing possibility that, after nearly a century of shame and inattention, the bodies of at least some of the victims could finally be found.

 “This step is unprecedented,” Mayor G.T. Bynum said in an interview on Wednesday. “This is the part of the search where we’re moving beyond what anyone’s ever done before.”

The effort still needs to clear some procedural hurdles, including the notification of family members of people whose graves are near the site, Dr. Stackelbeck said in an interview. But Mr. Bynum said he was confident the excavation would go forward.

Jim Goodwin, a lawyer in Tulsa and publisher of The Oklahoma Eagle, said residents had been asking city leaders to find the bodies of the victims for years. Mr. Goodwin’s grandfather was a business manager at a newspaper that was burned down in the massacre.

“The fact that our mayor is doing it when requests have been made of other mayors, the fact that he’s taking it seriously and making an effort to do something about it, to his credit, is something I think is very important rather than ignoring and trying to bury the memory,” Mr. Goodwin said.

The rampage started on May 31, 1921, after an accusation that a black man had sexually assaulted a white woman. Charges were later dropped, and it was most likely that the man had tripped and accidentally stepped on the woman’s foot, according to a 2001 report from the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.

Crowds gathered outside the courthouse where he was held. Some black residents, concerned for the man’s safety, armed themselves to patrol the streets. A mob of white men then attacked and set fire to the predominantly black Greenwood neighborhood, including the prosperous business district known as Black Wall Street.

As many as 300 people were killed, and a whole section of the city destroyed, including more than 1,200 homes. Witnesses said they saw bodies being dumped in some parts of the city.

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School violence tip lines reveal suicide crisis

Across the country, as officials look for ways to prevent school shootings, states have started tip lines like SafeOregon — websites, apps and phone numbers that let students anonymously report concerns about classmates, reported NBC News. But in many places, reports of students self-harming or feeling suicidal have far outpaced the number of threats against schools, according to annual reports compiled by state agencies, forcing communities to confront a different kind of crisis.

Since SafeOregon launched in January 2017, it has received 540 reports of a suicidal student, compared to 278 reports of a threatened attack on a school. Pennsylvania’s Safe2SayPA took in 2,529 reports related to self-harm and 2,184 related to suicidal thoughts in its first six months last year, while threats against schools accounted for 607 reports. Nevada’s SafeVoice tip line, launched in 2018, collected 371 suicide threats, 350 reports of self-harm and 248 threats to a school in its first year. In Wyoming, suicide threats were the most common report to the Safe2Tell tip line in 2019, with 239 instances submitted, compared to 45 reports of planned school attacks.

In the aftermath of mass shootings at schools in Parkland, Florida, and Santa Fe, Texas, school districts and lawmakers have poured billions of dollars into efforts to prevent another one. Much of that work has focused on fortifying campuses, adding panic buttons and bulletproof glass, and hiring more officers in schools.

But it’s far more likely that a school will lose a student to suicide than see one die in a mass shooting on campus. Five people were killed in a school shooting in 2017, and 30 in 2018, according to NBC News’ count. The number of children who took their own lives nearly doubled from 2007 to 2017, when there were 3,008 suicides among people ages 10 to 19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Psychologists and counselors say these figures, and the data from the tip lines, should be a wake-up call to a far more likely threat that has not received the same urgent focus.

“School violence is not our only concern,” said David Lillenstein, president of the Association of School Psychologists of Pennsylvania. “We also have a bigger concern and that’s with mental health and mental well-being. Stronger locks don’t prevent a suicide.”

At first, police and school officials in Hermiston were skeptical of SafeOregon, a statewide initiative approved by the Oregon legislature. Edmiston, the police chief, said he initially viewed it as another mandate dumped on local law enforcement. Hermiston High School Principal Tom Spoo feared the tip line would be inundated with bogus reports. But after the November 2017 incident, Spoo said, “I thought, ‘Damn, this thing is going to work after all.’”

SafeOregon operates like many school safety tip lines. Once students submit a tip, whether through a call, the app or the website, a dispatch center reviews whether it’s an emergency and forwards it to police, a handful of school administrators, or both. Spoo has become used to receiving phone calls in the middle of the night warning that a student is in danger of hurting themselves.

“I knew of the mental health issues that we face in this area, and maybe even across the country, but I don’t think I understood the magnitude until you start taking those phone calls,” Spoo said.

The tip line has led to multiple interventions that may have prevented suicides, officials say. In one incident, described in a SafeOregon annual report, a crisis team visited a student’s home and discovered that she and her sister were being neglected, after a friend reported that the student had messaged her about suicide. Another student who talked about wanting to “blow her brains out” was connected with counselors after someone reported her comments through SafeOregon.

“The number of reports we get is saying that it works,” said Capt. Tim Fox, of the Oregon State Police. “The Hermiston incident says that it works.”

A key element that makes these tip lines successful, officials say, is that students don’t have to make a phone call or talk to anyone in person.

“Teens today worry about how others see them and are often afraid of being called a ‘snitch’ or fear retaliation for reporting a tip,” said Lily Brown, 16, a high school student in Roseburg, Oregon, who is a youth advocate for the tip line, helping to spread the word. “SafeOregon allows students to report tips in complete privacy.”

In Pennsylvania, 90 percent of tips come through the smartphone app, according to Brittney Kline, director of Safe2SayPA. She credits the tips with preventing multiple students from taking their own lives, including one attempted suicide that was interrupted by police. The Nevada Department of Education held focus groups prior to launching its tip line and found that students said they’d be more likely to reveal their feelings through text, said Christy McGill, director of the department’s Division of Safe and Respectful Learning.

At least 10 states now run school safety tip lines — Colorado, Florida, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah and Wyoming — and an anonymous reporting system is also available to districts nationwide from Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit started by parents of school shooting victims in Newtown, Connecticut. Last month, Iowa’s governor proposed creating the state’s own version.

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Lawmakers call for 'torturous' solitary confinement to end

Calling the practice torturous and degrading, a group of Pennsylvania lawmakers, clergy and prison reform advocates gathered in the state Capitol  to call for new laws limiting solitary confinement of prisoners across the state, reported The Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

The event took place the same day that advocates erected an 8×12 foot solitary confinement cell in the Capitol. Outfitted with just a sink and a bed, advocates said the replica shows the conditions inmates face when they spend months or years in so-called “restricted housing units.”

“Solitary confinement is a form of torture,” said Sen. Larry Farnese, D-Philadelphia, a sponsor of a Senate bill putting new restrictions on solitary confinement sentences. “It warehouses people with problems rather than addressing them before releasing people back to society.”

Secluding inmates is a common disciplinary tool in American jails and prisons, despite evidence that prolonged isolation causes depression, psychosis, and suicidal ideation. 

Solitary confinement is generally reserved for inmates who pose a danger themselves or others. But critics of the practice say it can be liberally doled out as a punishment for minor infractions, and that prisoners have no way to appeal a solitary confinement sentence. 

Confined inmates are also subjected to frequent strip-searches when they leave their cells to shower or eat, said Doug Hollis, a formerly incarcerated person who says he spent 30 days in isolation.

 “It’s a humiliating experience,”Hollis said. “You’re stripped of your dignity… whatever the reason [for being there], it’s dehumanizing and wrong.”

In Pennsylvania, 85 percent of inmates in solitary confinement were sent there for failing to obey an order, according to a news article shared by the state Department of Corrections. 

A 2018 report by The Appeal, a non-profit criminal justice news site, found that some of the more than 100 inmates in solitary confinement in Pennsylvania had been held in seclusion for months or years. 

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American Journal of Public Health dedicates issue to criminal justice and mass incarceration

This supplement issue examines the public health concerns surrounding mass incarceration, with research and perspectives on improving health outcomes for justice-involved populations, psychological distress in solitary confinement, the links between mass incarceration and climate change, the public health implications of criminal justice reform, and more.

The American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) is dedicated to the publication of original work in research, research methods, and program evaluation in the field of public health. The mission of the journal is to advance public health research, policy, practice, and education.

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Georgia man executed for 1997 murder of ex-wife and boyfriend

The 2nd Execution of 2020

On January 29, 2020, Georgia executed Donnie Lance for the 1997 murders of his ex-wife and her boyfriend in Jackson County, reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Time of death was 9:05 p.m.

Lance, 65, who was sentenced to death in 1999, was given a lethal injection of pentobarbital at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson. 

He declined to make a final statement, to hear a final prayer. He’d already spent the day praying with family, including his adult kids, who had tried to stop the state from executing him for the deaths of their mother, Joy Lance, 39, and her boyfriend, Dwight “Butch” Wood Jr., 33.

Lance closed his eyes as the warden finished reading the death warrant. 

The drug began to flow at about 8:54 p.m.

At 8:56 p.m., Lance blew out a large puff of air. A woman in the front row cried. Lance’s mouth came open, but he barely moved except for wiggling his toes occasionally.

By 9 p.m., the color had drained from Lance’s face. Moments later, his arms and hands, which were strapped to the gurney, became pale.

He was gone.

FUTILE COURT FIGHTS

The U.S. Supreme Court denied Lance’s final appeals at roughly 8:15 p.m., clearing the way for his execution. 

The high court, in two separate orders, declined to hear Lance’s requests that it halt his execution on grounds of alleged prosecution misconduct and lower-court rulings that denied his request for DNA testing.

One of Lance’s filings to the nation’s highest court said if his grand jury was not randomly selected, “his death sentence is invalid and unconstitutional.”

Wednesday afternoon, in a brief order, the Georgia Supreme Court turned down a similar appeal. The justices said Lance’s motion was “lacking arguable merit.” The vote was 8-0, with Justice Sarah Warren disqualified from the case because she had worked for the state Attorney General’s Office.

Before Wednesday’s filing in the U.S. Supreme Court, Lance’s legal team filed a separate appeal before the high court. The other appeal challenges lower court rulings that denied Lance's request for DNA testing of the state's evidence.

The nation’s highest court rejected both appeals.

Lance’s attorneys have also argued that the jury that convicted him and sentenced him to death should have known he had brain damage and an IQ that makes him borderline intellectually disabled.

Lance has maintained his innocence, and his grown children have spent months unsuccessfully calling for DNA testing on case evidence to confirm whether he killed their mother.

FAMILY’S FINAL VISIT

Stephanie Cape and her brother Jessie Lance visited their dad Wednesday afternoon and shared old stories and memories, trying not to think about his fate. The siblings said they’d both been thinking a lot about what their mother would think of the situation.

"I can't imagine any mother would want this to happen," Jessie Lance told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Just let us keep our dad."

Stephanie Cape had her last embrace with her father. He told her to remember that just because he's leaving doesn't mean he's going anywhere.

Donnie Lance told his kids he had been saved and intended to go to heaven with all their other lost family members.

The siblings had spent their lives with a cavernous void where their mother should’ve been. Their father filled it best he could, they said, by offering advice and encouragement. 

The siblings know that other relatives of the victims wanted their father dead. But Stephanie Cape said — and her brother agreed — that the two of them were the only ones with something left to lose in the case. “Everybody else has already lost all they’re going to lose,” the daughter said.

What could those who wanted Donnie Lance dead gain from his death? Tammy Dearing, Wood’s sister, explained moments after she walked out of the death chamber: “I feel relief this is over, no more worries about appeals — we got our justice.”

THE TERRIBLE CRIME

Lance’s death marks the end to a complex and emotionally trying saga.

It began on Nov. 8, 1997, when Joy Lance, who had worked as a secretary at a trucking company, was savagely beaten to death. Her boyfriend, Wood, a truck driver and father of three, was shot in the back with a shotgun. The bodies were found at Wood’s home in the Maysville area, and police brought Donnie Lance in for questioning within hours.

Donnie Lance’s attorneys noted there was no physical evidence on him, in spite of the bloody nature of his ex-wife’s beating. The lawyers asked for DNA testing on wood fragments from what is believed to be the butt of the shotgun and a fingerprint from a shotgun shell found at the scene. 

Jackson County District Attorney Brad Smith and state attorneys have said the evidence against Lance, “although circumstantial, was overwhelming.” Prosecutors maintain Lance was abusive to his ex-wife for years before the murders. Witnesses said they’d heard Donnie Lance threaten to kill her if she divorced him and became involved with Wood.

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GateHouse: The unintended consequences of mass incarceration

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

January 31, 2020

America leads the world in incarceration with roughly 2.2 million people currently in prisons and jails nationwide - a 500% increase over the last 40 years.

Nearly two-thirds of those in prison are people of color. In fact, black men are six times more likely to be incarcerated as white men. There is a one in three chance that a black man born in 2001 will end up incarcerated during his lifetime, according to the Sentencing Project.

An increasing concern is the number of women incarcerated. Since 1980 the number of women incarcerated has jumped by more 750%.

The impact on those incarcerated is obvious. However, the impact of incarceration reverberates beyond prison walls. Kristin Turney, a University of California-Irvine sociologist wrote that the impact on children of incarcerated parents is “an overlooked and unintended consequence of mass incarceration.”

Turney’s research in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior compared children under age 18 with similar socioeconomic characteristics and family backgrounds and found that having a parent in prison or jail was linked to poor health; ADHD; behavioral or conduct problems; learning disabilities; anxiety; and developmental delays.

The scope of the problem is significant. Between 50% to 75% of incarcerated individuals report having a minor child. According to the National Institute of Justice, the number of children who have experienced parental incarceration at least once in their childhood may range from 1.7 million to 2.7 million. If this estimate is on target, 11% of all children may be at risk.

The economic impact on families of incarcerated parents is profound. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than half of fathers in state prison report being the primary wage-earner in their family. Many families affected by incarceration were already economically disadvantaged.

The increased economic stress on families impacted by incarceration is due to several factors. One is the extra expenses incurred by families trying to stay connected with a parent or loved one in prison. A partner on the outside is often saddled with legal fees, the loss of an additional income or their own job loss stemming from increased work/childcare conflict. They must then somehow deal with new costs such as exorbitant prison telephone fees, travel costs - often great distances - to visit incarcerated partners, and the desire to support loved ones with supplies and money. Financial strife is one of the most frequently cited sources of stress or strain among partners of incarcerated individuals.

Incarcerated mothers are also an alarming problem. According to the Sentencing Project, the number of incarcerated women increased from a total of 26,378 in 1980 to 225,060 in 2017.

Nearly two-thirds of mothers in state prisons were living with their children prior to their incarceration. The separation of mother and child can be quite dramatic for both parent and child. To further exacerbate the problem many of those mothers were single parents. The children of those women are now uprooted from their home, often with limited contact with their mothers. According to Eric Martin of National Institute of Justice, the research on children of incarcerated mothers suggests “a host of negative child outcomes, including poor academic performance, classroom behavior problems, suspension, and delinquency.”

As estimated by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the annual cost of incarceration in the United States is $81 billion. That figure addresses only the cost of operating prisons, jails, parole, and probation - leaving out policing and court costs, and costs paid by families to maintain relationships with loved ones.

In a new report, the Prison Policy Initiative found that mass incarceration costs state and federal governments and American families $100 billion more each year than previously thought.

Setting aside the enormous costs, policymakers should consider what has been achieved by the explosion of incarceration over the last half-century - and its negative impact on children and parents alike?
Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010” was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter at @MatthewTMangino.

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