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While Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) maintains a firm stance on the effectiveness of the death penalty in managing drug trafficking in Singapore, the article presents evidence suggesting that the methodologies and interpretations of these studies might not be as substantial as portrayed.

Texas executes Robert Pruett

Robert Pruett
Texas executed a man on Thursday convicted of murdering a prison guard in 1999, after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a last-minute appeal to spare his life despite arguments by his lawyers that he was innocent.

Robert Pruett, 38, was put to death by lethal injection at the state’s death chamber in Huntsville and pronounced dead at 6:46 p.m. (2346 GMT), the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said. 

He was the 544th person executed in Texas since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, the most of any state. It was Texas' 6th execution this year.

"I've hurt a lot of people and a lot of people have hurt me. I love ya'll so much. Life don't end here it goes on forever. I've had to learn lessons in life the hard way. One day there won't be a need to hurt people," Pruett was quoted as saying in his last statement by the criminal justice department.

About an hour before the scheduled execution, the Supreme Court said it rejected Pruett's petition. It did not provide a reason.

Pruett, sent to prison as a teenager and serving a 99-year sentence as an accessory to a murder committed by his father, was convicted of killing prison guard Daniel Nagle by stabbing him repeatedly with a shank.

The Nagle family said in a statement released by the department: "Though it has been over 18 years since he was taken from us, we still miss Daniel every day and the execution will in no way minimize our loss."

Prosecutors said he murdered the corrections officer because Nagle had reprimanded him for carrying a sandwich into the recreation yard. Torn pieces of the disciplinary report on Pruett were found near Nagle’s body.

“No witnesses testified they observed the attack, and no physical evidence connected Robert Pruett to the murder,” Pruett’s lawyers wrote in their petition to the Supreme Court filed on Tuesday.

They said Pruett, who has maintained his innocence, was convicted on the unreliable testimony of prison informants and that neither Pruett’s fingerprints nor DNA material were found on the torn report. Lawyers had also asked the state to release the shank and Nagle’s clothes for DNA testing after inconclusive tests took place in 2000.

In a legal filing with the Supreme Court, the state of Texas said: “Pruett has raised nothing new that casts any doubt on his guilt.”, 2017

Pruett becomes the 6th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in Texas and the 544th overall since the state resumed capital punishment on December 7, 1982.

Pruett becomes the 20th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1462nd overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977.

Sources: Reuters & Rick Halperin, October 12, 2017


Inmate executed in Texas for corrections officer's death


HUNTSVILLE, Texas — A Texas inmate convicted in the death of a prison guard was executed Thursday after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his lawyers' attempts to halt the punishment.

Robert Pruett was given a lethal injection for the fatal attack on corrections officer Daniel Nagle in December 1999 at a prison southeast of San Antonio. Nagle was repeatedly stabbed with a tape-wrapped metal rod, though an autopsy showed he died from a heart attack that the assault caused. Prosecutors have said the stabbing stemmed from a dispute over a peanut butter sandwich that Pruett wanted to take into a recreation yard against prison rules.

In his final statement before being put to death, the 38-year-old Pruett said he hurt a lot of people and a lot of people hurt him. He said he was sorry and held no grudges.

"I've had to learn lessons in life the hard way," he said. "One day there won't be a need to hurt people."

He told his friends who were watching the execution through a window that he loved them. "I'm ready to go," Pruett said. "Nighty night, everybody. I'm done, warden."

As the lethal dose of the powerful sedative pentobarbital began to flow, he started to chant: "Love. Light. It's forever."

His voice rose as he repeated the phrase. He added obscenities and soon was yelling. He started to slur his words before slipping into unconsciousness. He was pronounced dead at 6:46 p.m. CDT, 29 minutes after being given the drug.

Pruett, who was already serving a 99-year sentence for a neighbor's killing near Houston when he was convicted in Nagle's death, lost two appeals at the Supreme Court as his execution neared. He became the 20th prisoner put to death this year in the U.S. and the sixth in Texas, which carries out the death penalty more than any other state. Texas executed seven inmates last year.

About 100 corrections officers stood in formation outside the Huntsville Unit prison as Pruett was being executed. They remained there as Nagle's relatives emerged from the prison after witnessing the punishment.

"While some people may not understand this, I forgive him because God's word tells us to do so," Nagle's wife, Crystal, said. "Now it's up to God, because Jesus is the one who does the final judgment."

Pruett's lawyers had asked the high court to review whether lower courts properly denied a federal civil rights lawsuit that sought additional DNA testing in his case. They also questioned whether a prisoner like Pruett, who claimed actual innocence in federal court because of newly discovered evidence after exhausting all other appeals, could be put to death.

Pruett avoided execution in April 2015, hours before he could have been taken to the death chamber, when a state judge halted his punishment so additional DNA testing could be conducted on the rod used to stab the 37-year-old Nagle. The new tests showed no DNA on the tape but uncovered DNA on the rod from an unknown female who authorities said likely handled the shank during the appeals process after the original tests in 2002.

Pruett's attorneys unsuccessfully sought more DNA testing and filed their federal civil rights lawsuit arguing Pruett had been denied due process. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the lawsuit last week, and the lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

Attorneys for Texas told the Supreme Court that Pruett's appeals were delay tactics after issues were "repeatedly raised" and "properly rejected" by the courts.

No physical evidence tied Pruett to Nagle's death at the McConnell Unit prison near Beeville. At his 2002 trial, inmates testified that they saw Pruett attack Nagle or heard him talk about wanting to kill the guard. According to some of the testimony, he talked about possessing a weapon as well.

Pruett had said he was framed and that Nagle could have been killed by other inmates or corrupt officers at the McConnell Unit.

Pruett's 99-year murder sentence was for participating with his father and a brother in the 1995 stabbing death of a 29-year-old neighbor, Raymond Yarbrough, at the man's trailer home in Channelview, just east of Houston. Pruett was 15 when the attack happened.

According to court testimony from a sheriff's detective, Pruett argued with Yarbrough and then got his father and brother to join him in attacking the man. Pruett punched and kicked Yarbrough and held him down while his father stabbed the man multiple times, the detective said.

Pruett's father, Howard Pruett, is serving life in prison. His brother, Howard Pruett Jr., was sentenced to 40 years.

Source: The Associated Press, October 13, 2017


Texas executes Robert Pruett, who insisted on innocence in prison guard's murder


The man convicted in a 1999 prison guard's murder always said he was framed by corrupt guards and inmates. After rounds of DNA testing that were deemed inconclusive, he was executed Thursday night.

Robert Pruett was executed in Huntsville Thursday night, completing the death sentence he received more than 15 years ago in the 1999 murder of prison guard Daniel Nagle.

Nagle was 37 when he was repeatedly stabbed with a makeshift knife in a Beeville prison. His body was found in a pool of blood next to a torn-up disciplinary report he had written against Pruett.

Pruett, 20 at the time, had already been in prison for years, convicted as an accomplice and sentenced to 99 years in a murder his father committed when he was 15. Prosecutors argued Pruett killed Nagle because of the report, but Pruett consistently and adamantly insisted on his innocence. He argued he was framed by corrupt guards and inmates about whom Nagle was writing a "lengthy grievance," according to a recent court filing. 

Pruett's 2002 conviction in Nagle’s murder was primarily based on eyewitness testimony from inmates, which his lawyers have argued is unreliable. He fought for years to test crime scene evidence for DNA in an attempt to prove his innocence. Courts twice ordered testing on clothes, the report and the weapon, but results were ruled inconclusive. In April, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals said the results would not have affected his conviction, setting the path for a new execution date.

Jack Choate, executive director of the Special Prosecution Unit, which prosecutes crimes in Texas prisons, said that after all of the court reviews, he didn’t see “room” for an innocence claim, mentioning how Pruett admitted on cross-examination he had asked an inmate to testify that he had cut his hand the day of the murder. Pruett’s blood on a prison shirt, he testified, was because of an injury he got lifting weights.

“I think when people look at the whole picture ... you can see what the jury saw and review that, and it makes for a very compelling case against Mr. Pruett,” Choate told The Texas Tribune on Monday.

But Pruett's lawyers fought his execution until the last hour. In his final appeal, he sued in federal court, claiming recent refusals by the trial court and prosecution to proceed with further DNA testing violated his due process rights.

The DNA evidence that was tested and deemed inconclusive by Texas’ high appellate court needs more examination, Pruett argued in court filings, because a partial female profile had been found on the murder weapon in its latest examination. He argued further testing could identify a culprit, but the state argued the weapon was likely contaminated by people on the defense team and journalists who have handled it without gloves since the trial.

“The prosecution and the state courts have stood in the way of identifying the actual murderer,”wrote Pruett’s attorney, David Dow, in his filing.

Three levels of federal courts denied this request, with the U.S. Supreme Court issuing its denial around 5:15 p.m.

While Pruett awaited his execution, the prison guard community remembered Nagle. Nagle was the Beeville president of Texas’ prison guard union, and he uttered his last public words when he went to Austin the same month of his murder to speak of dangerous understaffing in prisons, saying somebody was going to have to die before the state realized it had a problem, according to Lance Lowry, president of the union's Huntsville chapter.

Lowry said the ratio of prisoners to guards is still dangerously low today, and it was one of the causes of Nagle's death.

“He died alone ... he was killed in a room full of inmates,” he said. “Unfortunately, I expect to see more Daniel Nagles in the future here, and that scares me.”

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TDCJ issued a statement after the execution saying Pruett was deserving of the death penalty and that Nagle's sacrifice would never be forgotten. 

"Pruett ... was removed from society after being convicted of murder only to kill again within the confines of TDCJ ... We hope tonight’s execution provides some closure for [Nagle's] family."

Source: The Texas Tribune, Jolly McCullough, October 12, 2017


Texas Should Not Execute Robert Pruett Tonight


Robert Pruett, Polunsky Unit, Texas, 2013
Update: Robert Pruett was executed by lethal injection on Thursday.

Robert Pruett is scheduled to be executed by the State of Texas Thursday. He has never had a chance to live outside a prison as an adult. Taking his life is a senseless wrong that shows how badly the justice system fails juveniles.

Mr. Pruett was 15 years old when he last saw the outside world, after being arrested as an accomplice to a murder committed by his own father. Now 38, having been convicted of a murder while incarcerated, he will be put to death. At a time when the Supreme Court has begun to recognize excessive punishments for juveniles as unjust, Mr. Pruett’s case shows how young lives can be destroyed by a justice system that refuses to give second chances.

Mr. Pruett’s father, Sam Pruett, spent much of Mr. Pruett’s early childhood in prison. Mr. Pruett and his three siblings were raised in various trailer parks by his mother, who he has said used drugs heavily and often struggled to feed the children. When his father returned from prison, things got worse: Mr. Pruett says his family sometimes had to move to flee the police, and that his father introduced him to marijuana at age 7. By elementary school, he was using drugs regularly. By middle school, he was selling them.

And at age 16, he began a 99-year prison sentence, after his father stabbed a neighbor to death outside the family home, with Mr. Pruett present. The court found that Mr. Pruett was culpable under Texas’ infamous “law of parties,” whereby anyone who “solicits, encourages, directs, aids, or attempts to aid” a person who commits a crime is equally liable, no matter small his or her role. The extent to which Mr. Pruett assisted or encouraged his father is disputed, but even under the prosecution’s version of events, he did not kill the man.

At age 20, while still behind bars, Mr. Pruett was accused of killing the correctional officer Daniel Nagle. At 22, he was sentenced to death for the crime. He has maintained that he is innocent, and there is reason to believe he is telling the truth. The conviction relied largely on the testimony of inmate eyewitnesses, who are alleged to have received favorable deals in exchange for testimony. No physical evidence ever connected Mr. Pruett to the killing, and when he finally succeeded in having the murder weapon tested for DNA, nothing conclusive was found. Legally, that wasn’t enough to overturn Mr. Pruett’s conviction, but it should be deeply discomforting and raise serious doubts about whether he’s responsible for the crime.

But even a focus on the intense uncertainty surrounding his conviction for the crime of killing Officer Nagle risks ignoring what led to it: the original injustice that was committed against Mr. Pruett when he was a teenager, when he was given a life sentence for something that never would have occurred had he not had the misfortune of being his father’s son. As a minor in an adult prison, he faced threats of rape and violence, which he says began almost immediately upon his arrival. In his unpublished autobiography, while he admits that by that age he had spent years using drugs and committing petty thefts, Mr. Pruett ponders how anyone could consider 99 years a reasonable sentence for someone as young as he was:

At 15 I wasn’t old enough to be outside after the 11 p.m. curfew, I couldn’t watch R-rated movies without adult supervision, I couldn’t smoke, drink, get a tattoo, own a gun or even drive a car. Yet I was mature and reasonable enough to make decisions that would impact the rest of my life? Old enough to spend the rest of my life in prison? It is still unfathomable to me.

In recent years, the United States Supreme Court has begun to agree with this position. In 2005, the court ruled that sentencing minors to the death penalty violated the Eighth Amendment, with Justice Kennedy citing the growing body of research demonstrating that “juveniles are more vulnerable or susceptible to negative influences and outside pressures, including peer pressure,” that they have less control “over their own environment” and that “the character of a juvenile is not as well formed as that of an adult.”

The court subsequently went further, in 2009 abolishing life without parole for juveniles convicted of non-homicide convictions, and in 2012 doing the same for mandatory life without parole on homicide convictions. The court has increasingly recognized that young people have a limited ability to control both their impulses and their circumstances. If Mr. Pruett’s first conviction had occurred today, his legal team could have made a compelling argument that the sentence was unconstitutional. After all, the fact that father and son were given sentences that were effectively the same — Mr. Pruett was sentenced to 99 years, and his dad was sentenced to life — is in tension with the court’s conclusion that adults have greater power to control their environment.

Mr. Pruett’s story illustrates just how brutally the criminal justice system can mistreat minors. He is going to be put to death on Thursday because he was failed: first, failed by the father whose actions landed his own son in prison, and then failed by the Texas court system, which senselessly threw a teenager’s life away. His impending execution should deeply trouble the country’s conscience.

Source: The New York Times, Opinion, Nathan J. Robinson, October 12, 2017. Mr. Robinson is an attorney and a Ph.D. student studying criminal justice at Harvard University.


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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde

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