Texas Moratorium Network - Texas Death Penalty, Texas Executions, Texas Death Row Database

Main Menu

Home Page
Join Email Newsletter
Donate
Discussion Forum
Alternative Spring Break
2003 Texas Legislature
Contact Your Legislators
Lobbying Tips
Legislation from 2003
Sample Letter to Your Legislator
Travis County Moratorium Resolution
Take Action at the Political Party Conventions
Marathon Fundraiser
News, Editorials, Events
Bill Vaught Remembers
Democratic Candidates and the Death Penalty
Cell Phone Alerts on Execution Days
Sister Cities Talk to Texas
"12 Angry Jurors" Benefit
Pictures
Human Rights Day 2003
Links
Submit News
Site Map
Contact Us
Fair Use Notice

TMN Newsletter & Action Alerts

If you buy from the TMN online shop at Amazon, we get 15 percent of the purchase price. Once you are in the shop, you can search for any product sold at Amazon. Do some Holiday Shopping online at Amazon and help support TMN at the same time!

New Book by Death Row Inmate

Still Surviving [Click here to purchase book]

New Book

Cell Phone Alerts on Execution Days

Speakers Bureau

New ACLU Report

New Report from The Center for Public Integrity

New Amnesty Report: Death by Discrimination

Calendar

April

	Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
>					01	02	03
>	04	05	06	07	08	09	10
>	11	12	13	14	15	16	17
>	18	19	20	21	22	23	24
>	25	26	27	28	29	30

This Week's Events

Sunday, April 04
	March to Stop Executions Meeting

Monday, April 05
	Texas Moratorium Network Meeting Austin

Search events by...

Plea for inmate's life awaiting Perry's ruling

Posted on Sunday 28 March @ 17:32:47

Law officers, prosecutors agree, 'Justice would be best served' by commutation.

By David Pasztor

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Sunday, March 28, 2004

Joe Lee Guy is on death row even though he didn't kill anyone. Texas law holds that all those involved in a capital murder equally accountable, but in Guy's case he was held more so than the two men who actually killed 62-year-old Larry Howell and wounded his elderly mother, French Howell, on March 25, 1993.

When he was in elementary school in Plainview, Joe Lee Guy's classmates would throw pennies to the ground so they could laugh while he scrounged for the coins.

From that poor start, Guy's life was pretty much a steady downward slide. If bad breaks were horses, Guy could have ridden from the West Texas plains when he was just a little boy begging coins to buy food for himself and his younger sister.

Instead, he's spent the past 10 of his 32 years waiting to be executed, sent to Texas death row in a case so convoluted and unorthodox that even the district attorney who prosecuted him, a state district judge and two sheriffs involved in the case have come to believe there is no sound moral or legal reason to put Guy to death.

Guy's fate now rests primarily in the hands of Gov. Rick Perry, who has on his desk a unanimous recommendation from the Board of Pardons and Paroles that Guy's death sentence be commuted to life in prison.

"Justice would be best served if this sentence was commuted," said Hale County Sheriff David Mull, who wasn't in office when Guy was convicted in 1994 but has learned details of the case since. "(It's) the right thing to do."

Perry received the parole board's recommendation in January but has not indicated whether he will grant the request.

For most people, life behind bars wouldn't seem like much of a break. But if Perry grants the commutation, it would be one of the few turns of fate that has ever gone Guy's way.

"This is not the kind of guy that we intended the death penalty for, on a number of levels," said Phil Wischkaemper, a Lubbock lawyer now representing Guy. "The system broke down."

Didn't kill anyone

Joe Lee Guy is on death row even though he didn't kill anyone. Texas law holds that all those involved in a capital murder equally accountable, but in Guy's case he was held more so than the two men who actually killed 62-year-old Larry Howell and wounded his elderly mother, French Howell, on March 25, 1993.

The Howells were known to keep a fair amount of cash in their convenience store because they offered a check-cashing service.

When his cousin enlisted him to help rob the store, Guy's job was to stand lookout and drive the getaway car. He was a pliable accomplice, court records indicate, a slow-witted young man so eager to please that he thought letting classmates beat him up was a way of making friends.

Guy did his job, waiting outside as Ronald Springer and Thomas Howard pulled on ski masks and set out to rob the store.

The plan all along was for Springer and Howard to shoot the Howells, then Guy would come in and help empty the cash registers.

Howard shot both Howells before Guy entered the store, but then the three men couldn't get the cash registers to open. Springer grabbed one and carried it out of the store. It was later found across the street with about $10,000 still inside.

Larry Howell died from his wounds, and French Howell recovered. After the three men were arrested, Guy confessed to his role in the crime.

The three men were tried separately, but when reckoning time came, Guy was the only one sentenced to death. Springer and Howard, the triggerman, each received life sentences.

Guy's bad luck was being appointed a lawyer whose own secretary would later swear out an affidavit saying that his "drug and alcohol use was so pervasive throughout the period of my employment, and his representation of clients, and in particular Mr. Guy, that I felt compelled to report his conduct to the State Bar of Texas."

Attorney Rick Wardroup kept lines of cocaine "pre-prepared in his desk drawer," according to the sworn statement from Regina Young, who worked for Wardroup for about two years.

On the drive to Guy's trial one morning, Young stated, she and Wardroup "did approximately 3-4 lines of cocaine each while driving from Lubbock to Plainview."

Wardroup, still a practicing attorney in Lubbock, did not return a phone call seeking comment on the case.

His record at the State Bar of Texas shows numerous reprimands and suspensions between 1985 and 2000, including sanctions for failing to act competently as a lawyer, bouncing a check to a court reporter, taking money from clients and failing to do the promised work, and neglecting his clients.

In fact, at one point while handling the early appeals of Guy's case, Wardroup had to enlist another lawyer to help because his own license had been suspended, court records show.

The upshot, according to Wischkaemper and briefs filed in Guy's later appeals, was that Wardroup did a lousy job defending Guy.

To help prepare the defense case, Wardroup hired an investigator named Frank SoRelle.

That was Guy's second piece of bad luck.

His best hope

Since Guy's guilt was never really in doubt, the best he could probably hope was that a jury would see fit to spare his life.

Typically, lawyers handling such a case scour the life and background of the defendant looking for so-called mitigating evidence -- proof of childhood abuse and neglect, low intellect, an absence of previous violence, anything that might prick a juror's conscience.

In Guy's case, there was plenty to be found.

"Guy grew up poor and neglected," explains the petition filed by Guy's latest attorneys with the parole board. "His mother . . . was addicted to gambling and routinely neglected her children as a result."

Ample witnesses and friends who watched Guy grow up were available to testify that his mother didn't buy food, that the family's utilities were often shut off, that she "abused drugs, smoking marijuana while she was pregnant with Guy and later, after her own mother died when Guy was 13, abusing both powder and rock cocaine," the petition says.

Guy was abused and ridiculed by his classmates for being slow and wearing ratty clothes.

One witness could have told the jury how "Guy once had managed to save $200 -- an almost impossible task for this extraordinarily impoverished child -- so that he could go to Six Flags with his school mates," the petition says. "(His mother) at the time addicted to drugs and gambling, stole the money instead."

But the jury heard none of that, because SoRelle, the investigator hired by Wardroup, did not turn any of it up.

What SoRelle did do, according to court records, is strike up enough of a kinship with French Howell, a victim of the crime, that one month after Guy was sentenced to death, Howell changed her will and left SoRelle her entire estate.

SoRelle, who did not return a phone call seeking comment, is now a real estate agent in Lubbock. When Wardroup hired him to investigate Guy's case, SoRelle was a failed businessman with many debts and precious little investigative experience.

He wasn't a licensed investigator, had no training and had handled mostly civil matters. He had never investigated a murder case, much less a death case.

When Guy's trial came in 1994, Wardroup and SoRelle had drummed up only four witnesses to speak on his behalf, and they were hardly persuasive.

But it was what happened after his trial that raised eyebrows among Guy's later attorneys and prompted the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is not generally friendly to death row inmates, to order an evidentiary hearing into Guy's case.

SoRelle, according to court records and his own testimony during the evidentiary hearing, became close to Howell and helped her manage her affairs.

"He was more interested in French Howell's money than he was in Joe Lee Guy," Wischkaemper contends.

When Howell died less than a year after the robbery, SoRelle inherited somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million after a bitter probate battle with Howell's brother.

In a sworn affidavit in 2000, SoRelle seemed to apologize for his behavior in the case.

"I now know that even though I was enthusiastic about the challenge that faced me, I wasn't qualified to do the job," SoRelle said in the statement. "I also know that my compassion for and the relationship I developed with Ms. French Howell created a conflict of interest. That conflict at times caused me to conduct my investigation in a way that was damaging to Joe Lee Guy getting a proper defense."

But SoRelle believed at trial that his client was guilty and deserved the death penalty, SoRelle said in his statement.

When French Howell took the stand, according to court filings, SoRelle sat off to the side of the courtroom and gave her signals on how to answer questions.

In the evidentiary hearing held later before U.S. District Judge Sam Cummings, SoRelle retreated from most of his statements in the affidavit, saying he was pressured by defense investigators to sign it even though it was not true.

Taken together, Wardroup's disciplinary history, SoRelle's inheritance, the paucity of a defense offered at trial and Guy's lesser moral culpability for the crime were enough to convince most officials involved in the case that Guy's life should be spared.

Terry McEachern, the district attorney for Hale County who prosecuted Guy, joined the request that Guy's sentence be commuted. Also signing on were state District Judge Ed Self, who now presides over the court where Guy was convicted, former Hale County Sheriff Charlie True and current sheriff Mull.

The parole board's recommendation remains under review in Perry's office, spokeswoman Kathy Walt said. An execution date for Guy has not been set.

Should Perry turn down the parole board's recommendation, Guy still has a slim chance of winning his legal appeals, but not much.

Technically, the case is still in Cummings' court, though it has been put on hold awaiting the governor's decision.

"Joe Lee is perfectly willing to spend the rest of his life in prison," Wischkaemper said. "He just wants off the row."

Faces of the Innocent on Death Row

Execution Counters

Send a free fax

Click for newspaper endorsements of a moratorium

Statewide Execution Vigils
Huntsville - Corner of 12th Street and Avenue I (in front of the Walls Unit) at 5:00 p.m.
Austin - At the Governor's Mansion on the Lavaca St. side between 10th and 11th St. from 5:30 to 6:30 PM.
College Station (Brazos Valley) - 5:30 to 6 PM, east of Texas A &M; campus at the corner of Walton and Texas Ave. across the street from the main entrance.
Dallas - Intersection of Mockingbird and Central Expressway at 5:30 p.m.
San Antonio - Main Plaza across from Bexar County Courthouse and San Fernando Cathedral - 5:30 to 6:30 PM
Houston - 1st. Unitarian Church at 5200 Fannin, corner of Southmore, 5:30 to 6:20 PM.

Texas Moratorium Network, Austin, Texas Phone: 512-302-6715 Email:admin@texasmoratorium.org