Yearly Archives: 2023

When Adolph Hitler assumed power in Germany in 1933, racial segregation in America was enforced through laws or lynch mobs. Anti-Semitism and laws restricting immigration reinforced the perception among most Americans that the ideal American was “white” and “Protestant.”

This social order had its roots in a widely accepted theory in place at the time in Germany (as well as other parts of Europe) called “eugenics science.”

This theory holds that certain human traits are inherited making one race of people superior to all others.

One of our so-called Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, was a subscriber to the eugenics theory.

Of course, proponents of eugenics always come to the conclusion that the Caucasian race (“white folks”) is the racially superior race—that white people are far more emotionally, physically and intellectually developed as a human species than those species of “other folks.”

Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi) rose to power with insurrectionist attacks on democratic institutions espousing one basic political agenda—that the Fuhrer could create a pure-white Aryan Race through eugenics that would rule the world with absolute power and death.

In what began under today’s “war” language as “territorial disputes,” German military forces killed roughly 11 million people that Nazi ideology deemed “unworthy of life”—Jews, homosexuals, Slavs and Jehovah’s Witnesses—in an effort to establish that eugenics-inspired Aryan race.

Millions of Americans prior to Hitler’s territorial disputes in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland in 1938-39 supported the Nazi ideology of racial superiority.

Even after America joined the worldwide territorial dispute in December 1941, millions of Americans still continued to believe in the eugenics nonsense and the slaughter of untold millions it was producing.

Hitler died in 1945 by a bullet to his head fired by his own hand or a bullet fired from a Russian rifle up his ass. Take your choice.

Yet two decades after what was truly WWII, an American demagogue named George Wallace was espousing the same Nazi-based white racial superiority before crowds of adoring, cheering white folks.

This demagogue pulled in nearly 10 million votes in the 1968 presidential election—or more than 13 percent of the total votes cast.

That means Wallace would draw roughly 42 million votes in a presidential election today.

These are still eugenics people in this country today that want to smash the nation’s democratic institutions through insurrection; and who subject racial minorities, non-Christian religious worshippers (Jews and Muslims primarily), all forms of LBGTQ people, and immigrants of every stripe to social isolation, physical hate attacks, and prejudice in all shapes and sizes.

And they have discovered a new Nazi-like leader to hail as their savior—the recently indicted war criminal, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Like Hitler did with his European territorial disputes, Putin believes he has a right to embark upon territorial disputes with all former Eastern Soviet-Bloc European nations to bring them back into Russia’s “Motherland.”

And in order to accomplish these disputed territorial annexations, Putin orders, encourages, and/or allows his military forces—much like Stalin and Hitler did in WWII—to rape four-year-old daughters in front of their fathers and wives in front of their husbands; to knowingly target civilian schools, hospitals, places of worship, and high-rise apartment complexes in order to kill as many non-combatants as possible; to put tens of thousands of “convicts” on the front lines as human fodder in an effort to deplete Ukrainian military resources; and to murder any friend or foe who dares to criticize the Ukrainian “territorial dispute.”

It is sad to see so many George Wallace descendants increasingly coming out of the American political woodwork to either support or acquiesce to Putin’s Ukrainian “territorial dispute” effort.

History truly repeats itself.

Arthur Brown, Jr. became the fifth person put to death in the state’s death chamber in 2023 and the 583^rd since 1982—by far the most executions by any state since 1976 when the U.S. Supreme Court effectively reinstated the death penalty nationwide.

Brown was convicted, along with two other men, for killing four people and attempting to kill two others during a drug house rip-off in Houston in 1992. One of the other two men was executed in 2006 while the other is serving a life sentence.

It is often said that the death penalty deters murder. The 12 executions carried out by Texas in 1992 did not deter those four murders in the Houston drug house—or any of the other 2,239 murders committed across the state that year.

Texas does not execute people as a deterrent. It executes people, especially those of color, because it makes the state feel good.

Texas executed its first person—a white man—in 1819 for the crime of piracy—and it executed another 754 people up until 1964 at which time the state joined other states in a moratorium on the death penalty until the green light was given by the Supreme Court in 1976 to gin up the killing machines.

Texas has always preferred to experiment with black people on its new methods of execution.

The state legislature in 1923 put an end to hanging as the state’s method of execution and replaced it with the electric chair. That same year the infamous Huntsville prison was designated as the place where all executions would be carried out.

On February 8, 1924, Texas tested its new electric chair by executing five black men that day. The state did the same thing when it resumed executing people in 1982 by lethal injection with the execution of a black man.

Texas has always had a penchant for executing black men, especially those convicted of raping white women. Between 1819 and 1924 when the state was hanging people, the state hanged 29 black men for raping white women while executing just five white men for raping white women. No man was hanged for raping a black woman.

In fact, in 1919 a black dentist was lynched in Walker County just for associating with a white female work colleague.

Texans actually preferred unlawful lynching to legal hanging during the Civil War and well into and after the post-Civil War era.

In October 1862, the Great Hangings of Gainesville took place.

40 white men—all of whom were Unionist sympathizers or slavery abolitionists—were lynched and two others shot trying to escape in that small Cooke County community. It was the largest act of vigilante justice in America history. 19 of those men had been acquitted in court but were turned over to the lynch mob by the court anyway.

More people were lynched in Texas during the post-Civil War era (493) than were lawfully hanged by the state. The lynchings carried on well into the 20^th century. For example, 9 black people were lynched in a single day in Walker County in 1908 and a decade later six members of a black family were lynched in 1919.

Today, a century later, Texas is still killing people.

The state has another execution scheduled this month and another next month. There are roughly another 183 people on death row awaiting their death date.

Every death penalty case has its own share prosecutorial charging arbitrariness, prosecution/law enforcement misconduct, juries selected exclusively to convict, judicially ignored or prosecution suppression of evidence of innocence, and lengthy post-conviction proceedings that can stretch into decades—all good reasons why the death penalty should be abolished. The  damage the penalty inflicts on the nation’s criminal justice system far outweigh any arguable value it may have in our society.

The Michael Dean Gonzales case is no exception.

An elderly husband/wife couple, 73-year-old Manuel Lugan Aquirre, Sr. and 65 year old Merced Gonzales Aquirre, were stabbed to death in their home in Odessa, Texas on April 21, 1994.

Gonzales, a next door neighbor of the Aquirres, was an immediate suspect in their killings because of a history of conflict between the neighbors.

Two weeks later, May 7, 1994, Gonzales was arrested and capital murder under Texas’s death penalty statute, Tex. Penal Code § 19.03. The statute authorizes the death penalty for 10 different crimes of murder. Gonzales was indicted under two of the statute’s subsections: (a)(2) that he killed Merced Aquirre during the commission of a burglary; and (a)(7) that he killed both individuals in the same transaction.

Gonzales was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death on December 8, 1994. That started what has become nearly a three decade post-conviction process, as outlined below:

1. On June 3, 1998 conviction and death sentence upheld on direct appeal by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA). One of the 18 issues raised on direct appeal was that the State failed to prove during the punishment phase of his trial that he killed the Aquirres as part of the same criminal transaction thereby rendering the death penalty illegal. The CCA rejected that issue. In an unusual move, the court designated that its decision not be published.
2. On October 13, 1998, Gonzales filed his first post-conviction habeas corpus application in the Ector County court raising 7 issues for relief. The application was denied and that decision was upheld by the CCA on March 10, 1999.
3. Gonzales initiated federal habeas corpus in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. That Court in 2003 upheld Gonzales’ conviction but reversed his death sentence. Three years later the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling, effectively sending Gonzales’ case back to the state trial court for a new punishment trial.
4. The new punishment trial was conducted on May 7, 2009 and Gonzales was again sentenced to death. The CCA upheld the second death sentence on September 28, 2011.
5. Gonzales initiated a second round of habeas pleadings. The trial court denied relief and the CCA upheld that decision in 2015, finding that Gonzales had abused the habeas process. The federal district court denied habeas relief in 2018 and the Fifth Circuit refused to hear the case in 2019.

In 2020, Gonzales filed a series of motions, one for DNA testing permissible under the provisions set forth in Chapter 64 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, and another to have the Texas Attorney General’s Office removed from the post-conviction process. The trial court denied the “new evidence” issues and in a 24-page decision handed down on March 3, 2022, the CCA rejected Gonzales’ attempts for DNA discovery to show that he did not kill the Aquirres in the same transaction.

While those pleadings were pending, a March 8, 2022 execution date was set for Gonzales by the Ector County criminal court.

 Faced with an impending execution date Gonzales’ Houston criminal defense attorney Richard Burr, one of the most respected death penalty attorneys in the nation, filed a 169-page habeas application essentially arguing that the state had engaged in serious prosecutorial misconduct, that new evidence would support Gonzales’ exoneration, and that Gonzales was too intellectually disabled to be executed.

In response to Burr’s emergency habeas petition, the CCA issued a stay order of the March 8 execution on February 28, 2022.

The CCA’s decision-making is both inexplicable and convoluted. Why grant a stay based on possible new exonerating evidence on February 28 only to rule three days later that there was no basis for a new evidence discovery process?

Richard Burr’s latest habeas petition is a chronicle of a law enforcement investigation process and the actual handling of the prosecution of Michael Dean Gonzales that involves unethical fabrications and the suppression of significant exonerating evidence.

And it stands as an indictment that as the Gonzales case meandered through the state and federal post-conviction process for roughly 28 years, these issues went either unnoticed or ignored. In a case penalty case, one never really knows.

Whether Michael Dean Gonzales is completely innocent of the Aquirres murders, or had some lesser degree of involvement in them, or is now too intellectual disabled to be executed are issues yet to be determined.

But what can be reasonably stated, and decided, is this case points to a need to abolish the death penalty in the state of Texas.

I do not believe he killed his wife, Maggie, or their son, Paul.

Here’s why:

The two gun theory does not work for me. Paul was killed with a shotgun blast to the head. Maggie was shot at least five times with a long rifle.

Maggie and Paul were killed near the family’s dog kennel. A video from Paul’s cellphone placed the trio together at the kennel shortly before the murders.

Where were the guns? It defies logic that Alex Murdaugh would have had them at the kennel. How could he conceal them at the kennel and retrieved them without Maggie or Paul noticing it?

If the guns were not stashed at the kennel, that means Alex would have quickly gone to a distant location, got the two guns, and returned to the kennel carrying a gun in each hand. Maggie and Paul would have seen him approaching carry both guns. Such an unusual sight would have aroused a fearful suspicion.

Once back at the kennel with the two guns, he would have had to shoot Paul in the head with the shotgun, drop it, pick up the long rifle, and shoot Maggie five times.

That defies logic, physics, and human behavior, especially by someone the prosecution, as well as the judge, said was an opioid addict.

And why didn’t the police immediately perform a GSR (gunshot residue) test on Murdaugh’s hands? GSR testing is standard law enforcement protocol when they are in the early stages of a family murder investigation.

None of the guns found at the Murdaugh residence were ever identified at the murder weapons that killed Maggie and Paul.

And how did Murdaugh get rid of the clothing, and clean himself—both of which would have contained blood, skin tissue, and brain matter—during the narrow 17-minute timeline laid out by the prosecution?

Why didn’t the police search the Murdaugh residence and grounds for that critical evidence?

My theory is this: two social media-driven teenagers showed up at the residence looking for Paul. They wanted to exact vengeance because Paul killed that young lady in a boating accident. Social media was filled with death threats and vows of revenge against Paul.

The teenagers entered the Murdaugh residence not realizing Alex was asleep inside. They found weapons readily accessible in the residence. Each picked up a gun. Both were cowards. They went outside to look around and stumbled upon Maggie and Paul. Surprised and afraid, one reflexively shot Paul and the other shot Maggie—the five bullet wounds a measure of the shooter’s fear.

They fled with the weapons—and they got away with murder.

National divorce.

That’s what Georgia right-wing Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is once again advocating: a divorce between Republican and Democratic states with the federal government being a small overseer of the two divided union.

Now Ms. Greene knows a thing or two about divorce. She recently divorced her husband after numerous media reports circulated about her alleged adulterous affairs with other men which left their marriage “irreconcilably broken.”

That will do it every time.

And Ms. Greene, even before her congressional days, has also been a longtime divorcee of Sanity, preferring to life partner with Insanity to help her through the tumultuous paths of life. There is the proverbial saying that, “ignorance is bliss.”

It’s worth looking at some basic facts before the Red and Blue states disavow their constitutional marriage:

• Red Union would get 8 of the 10 states with the highest unemployment.
• Red Union would get the five states with the highest murder rate.
• Red Union would get 6 out of the top 10 states with the highest suicide rate.
• Red Union would get 9 out of the top 10 states with the highest poverty rates.
• Red Union would only get 3 out of the top 10 most educated states.
• Red Union would get 8 out of the top 10 states with the highest divorce rates.

The last fact may be appealing to the congresswoman but it doesn’t appear that given these basic social facts, the Red Union would benefit from a “national divorce.”

However, for someone whose marriage to Sanity is “irreconcilably broken,” it may seem like a good deal—sort of like shopping for that “ocean front property in Arizona.”

As if America does not have enough problems, the country of “one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” must now fret over some of its elected leaders calling for a “national divorce” (QAnon speech for “succession”) in order to keep political and racial divisions alive.

I lost six minutes of precious sleep last night fretting over Rep. Greene’s “national divorce,” and tack on another lost hour of life  preparing this post.