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Thread: Arthur Lee Williams II - Texas

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    Arthur Lee Williams II - Texas


    Police detective Daryl Shirley



    Arthur Lee Williams II


    Facts of the Crime:

    Williams was convicted in the April 28, 1982 shooting death of police detective Daryl Shirley, 34, while the detective was attempting to serve a fugitive warrant on Williams.

    Williams was sentenced to death in Harris County in May 1983.

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    In today's opinions, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that oral arguments be heard in Williams' case.

    Orider is here:

    http://www.cca.courts.state.tx.us/OP...PINIONID=20350

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    Edited

    In a second death penalty case, the Court of Criminal Appeals agreed to further examine the nearly 3-decade-old case of Arthur Lee Williams for killing a Houston police officer.

    Williams was convicted of the fatal shooting of Daryl Wayne Shirley, 34, a Houston police detective, in April 1982. Shirley was gunned down as he tried to serve a warrant on Williams, who was wanted in Minnesota for parole violations.

    The appeals court asked for briefs from prosecutors and lawyers for Williams regarding questions about whether his trial attorneys did a proper job. Williams' appeal also raised questions about the constitutionality of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure and how it applies to questions jurors must consider when deliberating a death sentence.

    Williams, 51, is among the longest-serving death row inmates in Texas. He was 22 when he was arrested two days after the shooting and has been on death row since May 1983.

    http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/7299689.html

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    In today's Texas Court of Criminal Appeals orders, Williams' habeas corpus petition was DENIED.

    http://www.cca.courts.state.tx.us/OP...PINIONID=22647

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    EX PARTE ARTHUR LEE WILLIAMS

    In today's Texas Court of Criminal Appeals orders, Williams' subsequent application for habeas corpus petition was DENIED.
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

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

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    On June 12, 2013, Williams filed a habeas petition in Federal District Court.

    http://dockets.justia.com/docket/tex...01714/1090127/

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    Habeas Law Changes Give Hope to Texas Inmate

    By CAMERON LANGFORD
    Courthouse News Service

    HOUSTON - Citing the "tremendous changes to capital-punishment jurisprudence" since the 1983 murder conviction of a Texas death row inmate, a federal judge gave him a month to make his habeas case.

    Arthur Williams, a 55-year-old black man, is on death row for shooting to death Daryl Shirley, a white Houston police detective who was in street clothes when he tried to serve Williams with a warrant outside Williams' Houston apartment, on April 28, 1982.

    Williams describes the encounter on a website he set up to raise legal defense funds.

    "'Hold it Williams; move motherfucker and you're a dead man!' These were the words shouted in my face as I was being roughly pushed up against the breezeway wall of the apartment complex," Williams wrote in the 2012 post.

    Williams says Shirley was wearing a cowboy hat, checkered shirt, jeans and cowboy boots and pointing a 9-mm pistol at his face.

    Thinking he was being robbed, Williams says he grabbed Shirley's gun and tried to wrestle it away from him. The struggle went to the ground and Williams pulled a .38 derringer pistol from his back pocket while he was on top of Shirley, who flipped Williams off over his head.

    Williams says that as he turned back towards Shirley it looked like Shirley was reaching for his gun, which had been knocked to the ground.

    "I didn't know if he was reaching for the pistol or not, but I wasn't taking any chances because I only had two shots and if he got a hold of his pistol he would have had many more shots, so I pointed the derringer and pulled the trigger," Williams wrote.

    "The shot was deafening in the confined space of the breezeway, but I quickly recocked the hammer and pulled the trigger again." Both shots hit Shirley, who fell dead in the complex parking lot.

    During Williams' murder trial, witnesses called by the state and defense gave conflicting statements about whether Williams knew Shirley was a cop when he shot him, according to a recap in U.S. District Judge Nancy Atlas' Aug. 11 ruling on Williams' habeas petition.

    A Harris County jury sentenced Williams to death for the murder in 1983, unmoved by his argument that because he had been robbed in the past by someone who falsely claimed they were police, if Shirley had identified himself as a policeman, he didn't believe him.

    Williams' state habeas case "inexplicably...took three decades to run its course," Atlas wrote. He filed his federal habeas application in June 2013.

    Federal law requires prisoners to exhaust their state appeals before they can file a federal habeas case.

    Atlas found the evolution of habeas law, altered by several Supreme Court decisions since Williams' 1983 conviction, works in the man's favor.

    "Given the significant legal developments in the last three decades, the court has serious concerns about the integrity of Williams' capital conviction and death sentence," she wrote.

    As a "senior status" federal judge, Atlas, a Bill Clinton appointee, is semi-retired and has the option to take fewer cases but still gets her full salary.

    She gave three reasons why Williams' habeas petition survived the state's motion for summary judgment: the prosecution used its peremptory strikes to eliminate all six African-Americans from the jury pool, the defense called no witnesses during the trial's punishment phase and didn't present any mitigating evidence about Williams' background.

    The U.S. Supreme Court in the 1985 case Batson v. Kentucky ruled that prosecutors in a criminal case cannot reject jurors based solely on their race.

    The high court's Batson ruling came down when Williams' appeal was pending before the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals. Williams took the issue to the U.S. Supreme Court, which remanded the case and the state appeals court kicked it down to the trial court.

    In a 1988 Batson hearing a prosecutor justified the state's use of strikes to eliminate the six black potential jurors, and the appellate court denied Williams' claim.

    Despite that ruling, Atlas put Williams' fate in his and his attorney's abilities to research and write legal arguments, ordering him to find case-law showing that he was unconstitutionally convicted in light of the changes to habeas law. She gave him until Sept. 14 to respond.

    Williams is represented by Stanley Schneider with Schneider & McKinney of Houston.

    Asked what he thought about the ruling, Schneider said Atlas' clearly written list of the hurdles Williams must clear to prevail demonstrates it was a "thoughtful" order.

    For himself he said it means one thing: "I have a lot of work to do."

    Texas has not set Williams' execution date. It has executed 10 prisoners this year, more than any other state, with six more scheduled to die before 2016.

    http://www.courthousenews.com/2015/0...xas-inmate.htm

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    Judge Gives Hope to Man on Death Row

    HOUSTON (CN) — A Texas death row inmate won his decades-long fight for habeas relief this week when a federal judge found a state appeals court should have considered mitigating evidence: How remorseful he was for killing a policeman.

    Arthur Williams, a 56-year-old black man, is on death row for shooting to death Daryl Shirley, a white Houston police detective who was in street clothes when he tried to serve Williams with a warrant outside Williams' Houston apartment on April 28, 1982.

    A Harris County jury sentenced Williams to death for the murder in 1983, unmoved by his argument that because he had been robbed a few months before the shooting by someone masquerading as a police officer, if Shirley had identified himself as a policeman, he didn't believe him.

    Texas law at the time did not allow the jury to consider mitigating evidence.

    It required the jury to decide his sentence based on three questions: Did he act deliberately? Would he be a future threat to society? Did he act unreasonably in response to provocation?

    "The jury answered Texas' special issue questions in a manner requiring imposition of a death sentence," U.S. District Judge Nancy Atlas wrote in her June 28 order.

    Atlas found the Supreme Court's 1989 ruling in Penry v. Lynaugh warrants relief for Williams.

    In Penry the court found that Texas law did not let the jury give enough consideration to Johnny Paul Penry's mental disability as a mitigating factor, and remanded the case.

    The Penry ruling laid the groundwork for Williams' habeas victory 27 years later.

    The Penry ruling led the Texas Legislature in 1991 to amend the state's capital murder sentencing statute to include a fourth jury question: "Whether, taking into consideration all of the evidence, including the circumstances of the offense, the defendant's character and background, and the personal moral culpability of the defendant, there is a sufficient mitigating circumstance or circumstances to warrant that a sentence of life imprisonment without parole rather than a death sentence be imposed."

    The defense called witnesses during the guilt-innocence phase, who testified that Williams, then 23, was crying as he left the scene of the shooting and was crying hours later, and that he repeatedly apologized for the murder.

    The trial court also heard testimony that Williams had obtained his G.E.D. before he killed Shirley.

    Williams' state habeas case worked its way up to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which upheld his conviction in June 2012 on the grounds that evidence of his remorse, while relevant as a potential mitigating factor, could be fully considered by a jury under the "future-dangerousness special issue," as recounted in Atlas' order.

    Federal law requires prisoners to exhaust their state appeals before they can file a federal habeas case.

    Calling the appellate court's decision an "unreasonable application of Supreme Court precedent," Atlas decided that error was sufficient to grant Williams relief.

    "Had the current punishment phase questions been put before the jury, an effectual vehicle would have existed for the consideration of mitigating evidence. Because of the constitutional defect in the jury's ability to consider and give effect to all Williams' mitigating evidence, an additional special issue was required. The omission of a mitigating question requires federal habeas corpus relief," wrote Atlas, a Bill Clinton appointee.

    She granted Williams habeas relief unless Texas grants him a new punishment phase trial or commutes his sentence to life in prison within 180 days.

    The Harris County District Attorney's Office prosecuted Williams, so it must decide whether to pursue the death penalty. The district attorney's office did not return a phone message seeking comment.

    Williams' attorney Stanley Schneider sounded satisfied with the ruling on Wednesday, but said it could have been better.

    "I'm a little bit disappointed that we didn't get relief on the guilt issues," Schneider said in an interview.

    Williams vigorously but unsuccessfully argued that Harris County prosecutors illegally used their preemptory strikes to remove six black people from the jury pool, and that the district attorney's office had shown a pattern of nixing potential black jurors from capital murder trials.

    "A prosecutor's personal and his office's general prior history of discrimination, while relevant, does not of itself entitle an inmate to habeas relief," Atlas wrote, citing the Supreme Court's 2005 ruling in Miller-El v. Dretke.

    Schneider said he does not expect Texas to appeal, given Supreme Court precedent over the past 15 years, and because the Fifth Circuit has "uniformly upheld" grants of habeas relief under Penry.

    "The Supreme Court has reviewed these issues very closely and if there's any evidence in the record, and everyone agrees there is some mitigating evidence, in the trial record, then the opinion should be upheld," Schneider said.

    Schneider tried his first death penalty case in 1978.

    "In my first death penalty case I asked for a mitigation jury charge. And it was a decade later that the Supreme Court started talking about mitigation. So it's been a long battle to get to situations like this," the attorney said.

    http://www.courthousenews.com/2016/0...-death-row.htm

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    The state won't let this one go without going for the death penalty again. The district attorney there has said repeatedly that she will seek a death sentence for cop killers.

  10. #10
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    Officer's killer who's on death row gets new punishment phase

    A man sentenced to death for killing a Houston police officer in 1982 is entitled to new consideration of his punishment, a federal judge has ruled.

    Arthur L. Williams, whose attorneys had argued that jurors should have heard mitigating evidence in his March 1983 trial, will either be set for a retrial or have his sentence commuted to life in prison, U.S. District Judge Nancy Atlas decided on Tuesday.

    Williams' case was returned to the trial court under a Penry claim, which stems from Penry v. Lynaugh, a well-known U.S. Supreme Court precedent that sent dozens of cases across the country back to trial because of flawed jury instructions.

    In Harris County, some so-called Penry cases have gone back to trial and others have negotiated plea deals for life in prison. The decision in this case will be made by District Attorney Devon Anderson.

    Williams was convicted of killing Daryl Wayne Shirley, a Houston Police Department plainclothes detective who was serving a fugitive warrant on Williams on April 28, 1982.

    http://www.chron.com/news/houston-te...se-8334984.php

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