Death Penalty Ruling Hits Texas Hard

When Raymond Cobb’s conscience couldn’t take any more, when he couldn’t shoulder being a member of his high school band and a murderer too, he confessed his crime like a child -- not to the police, but to his dad.

According to court documents, he told his father that he had broken into the neighbors’ house in Huntsville, Texas, to steal a stereo. Surprised when Margaret Owings came home, he killed her. “I asked him, ‘What about the little girl?’ ” Charles Cobb told detectives. “And he just said, ‘She’s dead.’ ”

Cobb was 17 at the time. Kori Rae Owings was 16 months. He had buried her alive.

On Tuesday, Cobb became one of 72 death row inmates whose sentences were commuted by the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that the Constitution prohibits the execution of people who were under 18 when they committed their crimes.

Across the nation, the court’s decision sparked impassioned debate and prompted difficult questions: What special considerations do children deserve? Who is a child? And -- perhaps the toughest of all -- are some people beyond rehabilitation?

Nowhere did the debate rage as fiercely as in Texas. Since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, Texas has been responsible for about a third of the nation’s executions. Since then, of the 22 people who have been executed for crimes they committed when they were under 18, 13 were executed in Texas. Of the 72 inmates affected by Tuesday’s ruling, 29 -- about 40% -- are from Texas.

“This was the most horrendous thing I have ever seen,” said David Weeks, the Walker County, Texas, district attorney who secured a death sentence against Raymond Cobb, who is now 28 and has been on death row since 1997.

Cobb told police that he had been surprised when Margaret Owings lunged at him inside the home. He stabbed her, he said, then dragged her body to a wooded area to bury her.

He discovered the child sleeping inside the house and carried her outside as well, apparently unsure of what to do with her. He said the child “fell in the hole,” and once that happened, he said he put the mother’s body on top of the child and buried them together.

“The way he carried out the crime tells you more than what his physical age was,” Weeks said. “There are people younger than 18 out there who are as scary as anybody you can come across. They’re just wired differently. If ever there was a crime that the death penalty was designed to punish, that was it.”

That would have been the easy way out, said Jim Marcus, executive director of the Texas Defender Service, a nonprofit group that represents death row inmates.

“No one is trying to minimize these tragedies. The question is: Is the person who committed the crime someone who is morally culpable as an adult?” he said. “I don’t think any reasonable person would argue that 7-year-olds or 12-year-olds should be subjected to the death penalty. You don’t have to ask why. It’s just intuitive. Once you accept that premise, what is the cutoff? Today the Supreme Court said that it is 18.”

The first time Barbara Acuna’s heart was broken was when her son, Robert, a 17-year-old, was accused of murdering two neighbors who once paid him to mow their lawn. The second time, she said from her home in Baytown, was when she learned that the Harris County district attorney would seek to execute her son.

“He lived here at home,” she said. “He wasn’t old enough to vote. He wasn’t old enough to rent a car. He was considered a juvenile in every other legal aspect. And then all of a sudden he was old enough for them to go after the death penalty.”

Several death penalty opponents also noted that the 29 people on death row in Texas who were sent there for crimes they committed as juveniles include a disproportionate number of minorities. Nine are African American, 12 are Latino and one is Asian American. Seven -- or 24% -- are white, though Texas is more than 70% white.

Walter Long, a defense attorney from Austin who has worked on numerous death penalty cases, represented Napoleon Beazley, an African American who was 17 when he shot and killed a man during a carjacking. During Beazley’s trial, prosecutors pointed out that he had watched the film “Boyz N the Hood” before the killing. Beazley was executed in 2002 at age 25.

“They said he felt himself to be a little gangster,” Long said. “ ‘Boyz N the Hood’ does not take a positive view of gangs. It was just a way to seize on his race and prejudice the jury.”

Many law enforcement officers, however, condemned Tuesday’s ruling.

Harris County Dist. Atty. Chuck Rosenthal said the state Legislature had already determined that the appropriate cutoff for the death penalty was 17 -- a law that has been on the books for nearly 150 years.

“There is a line in Texas,” he said. “What I think the opinion really says is that five Supreme Court justices believe that their moral judgment is superior to that of the Texas Legislature. When the Supreme Court gets into line-drawing, they are overstepping their bounds.”

Charley Wilkison, political and legislative director for the Austin-based Combined Law Enforcement Assns. of Texas, the state’s largest law enforcement organization, said the law enforcement community feared that juvenile crime could increase because of the court’s ruling.

“For some individuals in Texas, and elsewhere, there is a great deal of a chance that at some point you are going to wind up in prison,” he said.

“At that point, the death penalty is the only real deterrent. It would stand to reason that gangs will recruit underage people to commit murders. The selling point, the spin inside the gang, would be: ‘You do it. Because you won’t get the death penalty.’ ”