Five African American Men in a Row Have Been Executed

Texas has put five African American men to death in a row, after last month’s killings of LeJames Norman and Ker’sean Olajuwa Ramey. The state will try to kill a sixth consecutive Black man on Oct. 7 – Jamaal Howard. 

Howard was 20 years of age when he murdered Vickie Swartout during a robbery in the deep East Texas town of Silsbee, near Beaumont, in May 2000. Like Norman and Ramey, he’d grown up poor and disadvantaged. Unlike Norman and Ramey, there is strong reason to believe he was intellectually disabled and mentally ill at the time of his crime. 

According to appeals filed by Howard’s current attorney, Don Bailey, Howard was a successful and much-loved student for most of his childhood. But he changed in his late teens. In the four years before his crime, he stopped communicating with people in any detail, only responding with yes or no answers, or no answers at all, despite being, in Bailey’s words, “quite conversational with persons who were not present.” He also became known for never bathing or changing his clothes. In affidavits collected by investigators, Howard’s family remembered him “staring into nothing” and wearing overlarge, dirty clothing through the summer heat, holding his pants up with his hand. 

Hoping to save his client from a death sentence, Howard’s trial attorney attempted an insanity defense. The judge appointed Dr. James Duncan, a psychologist, to evaluate him. Duncan reported that Howard’s cognitive processes seemed impaired and estimated that his IQ was between 65 and 70, which today could classify him as intellectually disabled and ineligible for the death penalty. Duncan questioned Howard’s competence to stand trial. 

After Duncan’s testimony, the prosecution agreed with the defense that there was now a question as to whether Howard was sane enough to stand trial. The judge convened a separate proceeding before a new jury to determine whether that was the case. The jury could not reach agreement. The judge called a second competency proceeding.

At that proceeding, a different court-appointed psychiatrist, Dr. G.E. “Ned” Groves, reported that Howard’s attempt to complete a cognitive exam was “notable for limited effort, if any.” He added that Howard “did not know the role of a judge, D.A., jury, or defense attorney” and “did not know what happened to people that were found guilty of capital murder.” Nonetheless, Groves opined that Howard was competent and his guilt trial resumed. An all-white jury, empaneled 40 miles from Jasper, Texas, where James Byrd Jr. had been lynched two years earlier, found him guilty and sentenced him to death. 

Bailey claimed in his 2020 appeal that Howard didn’t receive adequate legal representation at his trial, arguing that his attorney did not have him evaluated for intellectual disability, even though Duncan found his IQ to be in the impaired range. He also argued that the attorney should have hired an expert to research Howard’s life history and find mitigation evidence – ways in which Howard could be considered less culpable for his crime, like his documented attention deficit disorder, for which he was prescribed medicine that he did not take, and his possible mental illness, after Duncan’s suggestion that Howard could have been suffering from schizoaffective disorder at the time of his crime. 

“The record is replete with a picture of a bumbling attorney who was doing the bare minimum to get through a trial that could not end soon enough for him,” Bailey wrote in 2020. “[A] complete picture of Mr. Howard’s mental illness and life history was not presented that would likely have resulted in a life sentence.”

According to Bailey’s 2020 appeal, Howard spent the first years after the trial cycling back and forth from death row to the prison system’s psychiatric hospital outside Richmond, where he was prescribed the maximum dose of Haldol to control his diagnosed schizophrenia. 

On Sept. 28, Bailey and fellow attorney Jeff Newberry said they had filed a new appeal focused on Howard’s intellectual disability. The attorneys ask the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to pause their client’s execution and send his case back to the trial court to reexamine the evidence.

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