Jury Consulted Bible
Jurors read from scripture as they deliberated on
whether Khristian Oliver should be sentenced to death
Chris McGreal
The Guardian
15 October 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/15/texas-bible-jury-death-sentence
The
guilty of shooting and bludgeoning an elderly man to
death. Oliver had stood over his bleeding victim,
repeatedly hitting him in the head with a rifle butt
before robbing his house.
But then came the difficult decision over whether to
sentence Oliver to death, and that's when the Bibles
came into their own.
A clutch of jurors huddled in the corner with one
reading aloud from the Book of Numbers: "The murderer
shall surely be put to death" and "The revenger of blood
himself shall slay the murderer."
Another juror highlighted passages which she showed to a
fellow juror: "And if he smite him with an instrument of
iron, the murderer shall surely be put to death."
Ten years later Oliver, now 32, is just three weeks from
execution. Two appeals courts have rejected his pleas
for the jury's death sentence in 1999 to be overturned
on the grounds it was improperly influenced by
references to the Bible. Some of the jurors have made no
secret of the part their religious beliefs played in
reaching their decision but the
refused to take up a case that has been condemned as "a travesty".
Amnesty International has said the use of biblical
references "to decide life or death in a capital trial
is deeply, deeply troubling" and called on the
authorities in
of the 39 executions in the
Oliver's lawyers called four members of the jury that
convicted him to testify at an appeal hearing. At the
hearing, one of them, Kenneth McHaney described how
another juror, Kenneth Grace, read the Bible aloud to a
group of jurors.
Donna Matheny showed McHaney a Bible in which she
highlighted passages including one that "says that if a
man strikes someone with an iron object so that he dies,
then he is a murderer and should be put to death".
Maxine Symmank told the court that she too had read a
passage from the Book of Numbers: "And if he smite him
with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a
murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death."
Another juror, Michael Brenneisen, told a journalist in
2002 that he asked himself "Is this the way the Lord
would decide the case?" But Brenneisen also said that in
discussing the Bible the jury "went both directions in
our use of the scripture - forgiveness and judgement".
McHaney said there were about four Bibles in the jury room.
A
strike down the sentence because, it said, he had not
"presented clear and convincing evidence" that the Bible
influenced the jury's decision. The court acknowledged
that there was reference to the Bible by the jurors but
said it was not improper. It said "a conscientious,
dedicated" jury was "uninfluenced by any outside
influence of any kind shown to the court in this hearing".
A federal appeal court disagreed, saying that references
to the Bible inside the jury room were improper but it
still refused to overturn the death sentence on the
grounds that Oliver's lawyers had not proved that the
readings influenced the death penalty decision. The
court ruled that the jurors would have applied their own
moral judgements which would, in any case, have been
influenced by their religious beliefs.
Oliver's lawyer until last month, Winston Cochran, said
the rulings are the result of an impossible situation in
which he was prevented at the first appeal hearing from
directly asking the jurors if the Bible readings had an
influence on their decision. The federal court then
turned down a subsequent appeal on the grounds that the
jurors had not explicitly said they were swayed by the Bible.
"We were prohibited from asking the question we were
later being asked to prove," he said.
Cochran also criticised the appeal court view that
jurors were merely applying moral beliefs they already held.
"The problem is there was testimony the Bible was passed
around and shown to people. It was part of the
discussion. It wasn't just used by individuals to
reinforce their existing belief," he said.
With the supreme court refusing to take up Oliver's
case, his remaining options are the
pardons and the state governor, Rick Perry. The board of
pardons rarely recommends clemency and Perry is unlikely
to set aside a death sentence in a deeply religious
state on the grounds that jurors referred to the Bible.
Perry has in any case shown no interest in revisiting
controversial death penalty cases. This week he
described a man executed in 2004 for burning his three
children to death as a "monster" despite a growing body
of evidence that he was wrongly convicted on spurious
scientific evidence. Perry described claims that Cameron
Todd Willingham was innocent as anti-death penalty propaganda.
"Willingham was a monster. He was a guy who murdered his
three children, who tried to beat his wife into an
abortion so that he wouldn't have those kids. Person
after person has stood up and testified to facts of this
case," he said.
Perry has sacked some members of the
Science Commission just as they were about to review a
new scientific report highly critical of the evidence
used to convict Willingham. If the commission had
decided the evidence was flawed, it could have led to
the first official admission of a wrongful execution in
"Getting all tied up in the process here frankly is a
deflection of what people across this state and this
country need to be looking at," Perry said.
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