State Set to Execute Two Inmates Involved in Capital Murders

Texas prison officials have scheduled two executions, one week apart, for a pair of men convicted of the same criminal act. The state plans to kill LeJames Norman on Sept. 16 and, seven days later, Ker’sean Olajuwa Ramey. The state has also set three more executions for October and November. 

Kristin Houlé Cuellar, executive director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said she is deeply disappointed that Texas will attempt to kill five people between now and the end of the year, after a summer with no scheduled executions. 

“Even more concerning is the fact that everyone facing execution is a person of color,” Cuellar said. “And another concern is that three of these men were under the age of 21 at the time of the crime. Since 2005, when the Supreme Court banned the death penalty for people under 18 at the time of the crime, Texas has executed 65 people who were either 18, 19, or 20 years old at the time of the crime.”

The Supreme Court’s decision to ban the death penalty for juveniles was based in large part on the fact that young people are less culpable for their actions because their brains have not finished developing. Recent research demonstrates that the same logic applies to people between the ages of 18 and 25, because the parts of the brain that moderate impulsivity continue to develop into the mid-20s. 

Norman and Ramey were 19 and 20 years old, respectively, in 2005, when they murdered Celso Lopez, Tiffani Peacock, and Sam Roberts during an attempted robbery in the small Southeastern Texas town of Edna. Both young men had lived through chaotic, impoverished, and violent childhoods. In later appeals, they both argued that they received abysmal representation during their trials. 

Ramey’s trial came first in 2007. According to an appeal lodged a decade later, he was represented by an attorney who worked as a dentist during the day and only practiced law as a side business. The attorney had never before handled a death penalty case. Nor had he ever conducted a mitigation investigation, a crucial element of capital cases in which attorneys find reasons that clients guilty of capital crimes should be given lesser sentences like life without parole, rather than death. Mitigating evidence can include mental illness, youth, remorse for the crime, or physical and emotional abuse during childhood. 

Ramey’s trial took place before a nearly all-white jury. (Ramey and Norman are both Black.) According to his appeals, Ramey’s attorney conducted no independent investigation of the crime and did not call any witnesses during the guilt phase of the trial. Prosecutors relied on testimony from Norman. They also put jailhouse snitches on the stand who, his appeals allege, were offered undisclosed plea deals. The jury quickly found Ramey guilty. 

During the sentencing part of the trial, Ramey’s attorney called only two character witnesses and failed to present a plethora of easily discoverable mitigating evidence, his appeals state. This included evidence that Ramey suffered extensive physical and emotional abuse during his childhood and had an IQ of 81. Prosecutors called the notorious A.P. Merillat, an investigator of crimes inside Texas prisons, who offered the same kind of testimony that had helped sentence over a dozen men to death. Merillat swore that Ramey would be dangerous for the rest of his life, even if he received life without parole. The jury took 15 minutes to give him death. 

Norman’s trial took place the following year. He had admitted his guilt and offered to testify against Ramey shortly after the murders, when Tiffani Peacock, one of the victims, appeared to him in a dream. Norman described the dream during his trial: “I apologized, and she looked at me. I woke up and started trying to confess.” 

Because he had admitted his guilt, the only issue to settle at Norman’s trial was his punishment. Norman’s trial attorney hired mitigation investigators who compiled evidence that Norman was exposed to, in the words of one appeal, “an extraordinary level of violence as a child,” including regular beatings from his father. Both of his parents dealt drugs and participated in gang violence. In his teenage years, Norman saw his father shot and killed by police, an experience that gave him chronic nightmares. 

As in Ramey’s trial, prosecutors brought in Merillat, who testified that Texas prisons were “out-of-control facilities characterized by administrative dysfunction and constant violence [where] Norman would be all but compelled to commit further acts of violence.” Despite Norman’s remorse for his crime and his testimony against Ramey, prosecutors insisted in their closing arguments that he was “rotten to the core” and one of the “worst of the worst.” 

The appeals lodged on behalf of Ramey and Norman have all been denied by state and federal courts. Norman’s current attorneys are asking the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to reconsider some of his previous arguments. Ramey’s supporters are asking the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to recommend that Gov. Greg Abbott commute his sentence.

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