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Thread: Jack Harry Smith - Texas

  1. #11
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    No worries, I wasn't offended. You didn't write it. My comments were directed at the author.

  2. #12
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    IN THE COURT OF CRIMINAL APPEALS
    OF TEXAS

    NO. WR-8,315-07
    EX PARTE JACK HARRY SMITH

    ON APPLICATION FOR POST-CONVICTION WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS
    FILED IN CAUSE NO. 274702-C IN THE 230th DISTRICT COURT
    HARRIS COUNTY

    Per Curiam. ORDER

    In July 1978, a jury found applicant guilty of the offense of capital murder. The jury answered the statutory punishment questions in such a way that the trial court set applicant's punishment at death. This Court affirmed applicant's conviction and sentence on direct appeal. Smith v. State, 676 S.W.2d 379 (Tex.Crim.App. 1984). On March 11, 2009, this Court remanded applicant's case to the trial court. It has been more than two years since the application was remanded. Accordingly, we order the trial court to resolve any remaining issues within 90 days from the date of this order. The clerk shall then transmit the complete writ record to this Court within 120 days from the date of this order. Any extensions of time shall be obtained from this Court.

    IT IS SO ORDERED THIS THE 1ST DAY OF AUGUST, 2012

    http://law.justia.com/cases/texas/co...-8-315-07.html

  3. #13
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    EX PARTE JACK HARRY SMITH

    In an opinion dated June 26, 2013, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals DENIED Smith's petition for habeas relief.
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  4. #14
    Senior Member Member chris35721's Avatar
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    Have been informed by my son Corey, Smith is having heart failure and has stopped taking his meds. Says its only a matter of time.

  5. #15
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    Death row inmate, 76, is ancient by Texas standards

    By Mike Tolson
    The Houston Chronicle

    Two weeks after he turned 40, Jack Harry Smith showed no signs of letting middle age slow him down. So on the first Saturday in January, he put on a ski mask, grabbed his pistol and a buddy, and went charging into a Pasadena convenience store.

    As career criminals go, Smith never had been newsworthy nor successful. That changed by the time he ran out the front door of Corky’s Corner, and it wasn’t because of the small sack of cash in his hand.

    Behind him lay the body of Roy Deputter, the store’s bookkeeper who lived in a trailer behind the store and had rushed inside with a gun when he heard the commotion. Before him loomed capital murder charges.

    Smith’s lawyer says his client recalls little of the event. Prosecutors and lawmen typically are skeptical of convenient memory loss, but there’s a good chance he is telling the truth. On the day that Smith earned his ticket to death row, Jimmy Carter was threatening to slap a tariff on imported steel, Egypt and Israel were closing in on a historic peace accord, and the Dallas Cowboys were on the verge of their second Super Bowl title.

    Which is another way of saying that Smith is old. By the standards of Texas’ death row, in fact, he is ancient. No one lasts that long in the nation’s most aggressive capital punishment state, certainly not a three-time loser who has spent most of his life behind bars. This isn’t California, which sends many people to death row but rarely executes them. The only inmates to escape the death chamber are those spared by appeals courts or those so mentally ill they are not competent for execution. And there are but a handful of those.

    Smith is not one of them, and by rights he should not be alive. Yet he has beaten the odds and lingered on since 1978 — through six presidential administrations, countless Middle East negotiations and too many Super Bowls to remember. Tragedy has stalked his case for years and put his appeal on hold again and again. Now he is 76 and there’s no end in sight, at least not one imposed by the courts.

    Should that day ever come, Smith would be the oldest person in the U.S. to be put to death in modern times.

    “There would be absolutely no purpose to be served by his execution,” said his current attorney, David Dow, a University of Houston professor who oversees the law school’s innocence project. “This was not a notorious case, or a case involving a child, say. This was an instance of guys who knew each other stealing from each other, as I understand it. He didn’t kill a clerk. This case would not be prosecuted as a capital case if it happened today.”

    True or not, that particular notion has not deterred the Harris County District Attorney’s Office from pursuing execution dates in other cases. But Dow said he doubts that Smith is high on anyone’s to-do list.

    http://www.news-journal.com/news/sta...e6be6424d.html

  6. #16
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    No. 07-7049 *** CAPITAL CASE ***
    Title:
    Jack Harry Smith, Petitioner
    v.
    Nathaniel Quarterman, Director, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Correctional Institutions Division
    Docketed: October 12, 2007
    Lower Ct: United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
    Case Nos.: (06-70019)
    Decision Date: March 12, 2007
    Rehearing Denied: July 9, 2007

    ~~~Date~~~ ~~~~~~~Proceedings and Orders~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    Oct 9 2007 Petition for a writ of certiorari and motion for leave to proceed in forma pauperis filed. (Response due November 13, 2007)
    Nov 20 2007 Order extending time to file response to petition to and including December 13, 2007.
    Dec 14 2007 Order further extending time to file response to petition to and including January 11, 2008.
    Jan 11 2008 Brief of respondent Nathaniel Quarterman, Director, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Correctional Institutions Division in opposition filed.
    Jan 18 2008 Reply of petitioner Jack Harry Smith filed. (Distributed)
    Jan 24 2008 DISTRIBUTED for Conference of February 15, 2008.
    Feb 19 2008 Petition DENIED.

    http://www.supremecourt.gov/Search.a...es/07-7049.htm

  7. #17
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    There should be nothing preventing the setting of an execution date at this point.

  8. #18
    Senior Member Member Dillydust's Avatar
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    Almost 40 years on death row this amazes me especially in Texas. I don't know he made it through the 90s I especially don't know how he made it this far.

  9. #19
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Oldest inmate on Texas' death row dies of natural causes

    HOUSTON (AP) — The oldest condemned man in Texas has died at age 78 of natural causes.

    Jack Harry Smith died Friday at the medical facility located at the Estelle Unit in Huntsville, Texas, according to a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Smith had been in poor health for years and was taken from death row to the medical facility last week.

    Smith was condemned in 1978 for shooting a man trying to stop him and an accomplice during a $90 robbery of a Houston store. Only three of the some 250 prisoners now awaiting execution in Texas have been on death row longer.

    In a 2001 interview with The Associated Press, Smith said he was angry "at the courts for wasting taxpayers' money for giving me this hospitality."

    http://www.heraldcourier.com/news/ol...0f2f3419f.html
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  10. #20
    Moderator Ryan's Avatar
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    Oldest man on death row buried in TDCJ cemetery

    Sermon is given as a caution for other inmates

    By Mike Tolson
    The Houston Chronicle

    HUNTSVILLE - Jack Harry Smith spent most of his 78 years behind bars, much of it on death row, so it only seemed right that when the time came, he would spend eternity close to the world he knew best.

    mith, his body unclaimed by family or friend after he died earlier this month, was buried Thursday in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery, joining more than 2,000 former prisoners who drew their last breaths in custody, some of them as far back as the late 1800s.

    With the sun burning through the last of the morning haze, prison chaplain David Collier said a few words before Smith and three others were placed in recently dug holes near the bottom of a gentle slope on Peckerwood Hill. Seven prison trusties were the sole mourners.

    Until he passed on April 8, Smith was the oldest inmate alive on Texas' death row

    Collier had the advantage of having known Smith when he served as chaplain of the Polunsky Unit where he was housed. But in truth, he didn't know all that much about the man he was burying.

    "He was a Christian and of the Pentecostal faith," Collier said. "Jack always was talkative, unless he was having a bad day. We all have bad days. But he often wanted something to read and I'd take it over to him."

    Message of forgiveness

    A stepsister had met with Collier briefly earlier Thursday morning at a nearby church, standard practice for inmates who are to be buried at state expense. However, she chose not to come to the cemetery. By custom in such cases, all the inmates to be buried are set side by side and given a brief collective prayer and send-off.

    "What I say is really for the benefit of the living who are there," Collier said, referring to the group of trusties, most of whom will be released in the near future. "I remind them that they don't want to be buried here someday."

    He touched each casket, recited each of the deceased's names and age and cause of death, then spoke to the men who had prepared the graves about the story of David and Bathsheba, reminding them that God does not forsake even those who have greatly sinned.

    "If nothing else gives you heart, that should," Collier said. "There is nothing you can do that God will forsake you. He will never walk away - only you can."

    He turned away toward the top of the hill where a handful of relatives stood. If mourners show up, Collier always does right by them with a broader acknowledgment of the departed, and a longer prayer.

    In the great majority of deaths of those in the custody of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice - there were 432 in all units in 2015 - relatives take the remains for private burial. But 100 or so a year are left with the agency to dispose of. Most end up buried at Joe Byrd, as has been the case for more than a century.

    Avoided execution

    Smith entered death row in 1978 following his conviction for the killing of Roy Deputter during the robbery of a Pasadena convenience store. Before that, he had served 17 years of a life sentence received because of a robbery and assault. He was paroled in 1977 but soon resumed his criminal ways. He was out of prison for only one year before the murder that earned him a death sentence.

    But in an ironic twist, health problems complicated Smith's early years on death row, and he never got a date with the executioner. It was thought, instead, that he would die of natural causes. A heart operation worked and he lingered on through years of appeals, though others connected to the case were not so lucky. Two of his lawyers and the judge overseeing the case died, putting Smith in limbo. His case essentially fell through the cracks as he grew older.

    In 2001 and already into his 60s, Smith expressed anger that nothing was happening in his appeal. "I feel that the system is waiting for me to pass away of old age," Smith said in an interview with the Associated Press. "I'm angry at the justice system, at the courts for wasting taxpayers' money, for giving me this hospitality."

    It may have been a false anger. Collier suggested that Smith was pretty much resigned to his fate, knowing he would never go to the execution chamber. Although the Harris County District Attorney's Office maintained that Smith's case was still active - officially - in truth both sides mostly were going through the motions.

    Avoiding bad PR

    Smith's last lawyer, David Dow, said in 2014 there was no way the DA's office would push for an execution date, knowing that even if it were successful, the sight of an octogenarian prisoner being wheeled into the death chamber would make for bad PR. And one of Smith's former prosecutors agreed. An accomplice had been given a life sentence. By sheer fortune, Smith had ended up with one, too.

    Nobody seemed to mind all that much that he had cheated the hangman. Relatives of the victim were not clamoring for action. And Smith was far from the worst of death row's murderers. He would just keep getting older until the day arrived when he wouldn't.

    His grave will be marked with a small, simple headstone bearing his name, prison ID number, and his date of death. Whether anyone ever will show up on Peckerwood Hill with flowers can't be known. Most of the graves here are bereft of any such loving remembrances.

    Decades of erosion have stripped some of the headstones of all markings, and they no longer even carry the name of those whose remains lie below. More than most cemeteries, Joe Byrd is a place of the forgotten, and in many cases, the unmourned.

    Jack Harry Smith, number 615, now rests among them.

    http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news...ry-7382533.php

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