Dominique Green will be executed today, as scheduled.
Earlier this year, the Houston Police Department’s Crime Lab discovered 280 boxes of mislabeled evidence from some 8,000 criminal cases. Some of those cases resulted in men being sentenced to death.
Such as Dominique Green, who is scheduled to be executed today in Huntsville, TX for the 1992 murder of Andrew Lastrapes Jr.
Green’s lawyers have argued he should not be executed until all of the evidence from the boxes forgotten in the HPD property room has been cataloged. Last month, police said they had inventoried about 25 percent of the material and that the process could continue through the spring.
emphasis mine
In the Green case, HPD ballistics test linked the gun found in the car in which he was apprehended to Lastrapes’ robbery and murder. Green has admitted to participating in the robbery but denies being the triggerman.
So, Green’s attorney is not trying to halt the execution based on his client’s innocence. He’s simply trying to buy his guy a few more days on the tax payers’ nipple. Why? Because Green is guilty. Green knows it. His lawyer knows it. And, thankfully, the Pardons and Paroles Board–who voted 6-0 Monday not to recommend a reprieve for Green–knows it.
UPDATE: Dominique Green was put to death Tuesday night; he was pronounced dead at 7:59 p.m.
I don’t write about death row executions glibly; every time I read an account of the death chamber, a condemned man’s last moments, and the reactions of his family and victim’s family, my stomach turns. Putting a man to death is not a pleasant topic, nor should it be. But I support the death penalty fully. And I will continue to write about it, becasue I don’t want it to ever be something to be taken lightly.
— Uh, this has nothing to do with this post. Just needed to insert the words poker room somewhere in this post.
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[...] The 20,000th visitor to UrbanGrounds hit at 09:18 a.m (Central European Time) from somewhere in the UK. How’d they find my site? By Googling (in Italian) for “Dominique Green”—a former Texas Death Row inmate, whose execution I wrote about on October 26th, 2004. [...]
Dominique Green admitted to participating in the robbery. That is quite different from admitting to murder. How are you so certain that he is guilty?
If you were accused of a crime, wouldn’t you want your lawyers to go through all the boxes of evidence, not just 25% of them? Hmm. I think you would.
Because 10 people were robbed in a 3 day period. The 9 survivors, including the 4 who were robbed the same day but before Lastrapes was murdered, all identified Green as the one with the gun. Green also referred to himself as “trigger happy” in a letter to his mother while in custody. Also, all the evidence in the Green case was accounted for.