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Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Texas Ruling Singals Indefinite Halt to Executions
Texas Ruling Signals Indefinite Halt to Executions
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Published: October 3, 2007
HOUSTON, Oct. 2 — Signaling an indefinite halt to executions in Texas, the state’s highest criminal appeals court late Tuesday stayed the lethal injection of a 28-year-old Honduran man who was scheduled to be put to death Wednesday.
The reprieve by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals was granted a week after the United States Supreme Court agreed to consider whether a form of lethal injection constituted cruel and unusual punishment barred under the Eighth Amendment. On Thursday, the Supreme Court stepped in to halt a planned execution in Texas at the last minute, and though many legal experts interpreted that as a signal for all states to wait for a final ruling on lethal injection before any further executions, Texas officials said they planned to move ahead with more.
As a result, Tuesday’s ruling by the Texas court was seen as a sign that judges in the nation’s leading death penalty state were taking guidance from the Supreme Court and putting off imminent executions.
The Texas court order gave state authorities up to 30 days to explain in legal papers why the execution of the inmate, Heliberto Chi, should proceed. With responses then certain from defense lawyers, the effect of the order was to put off the execution for months, lawyers said.
Mr. Chi was convicted of killing the manager of a men’s store in Arlington in 2001.
Other executions, including four more scheduled in the next five months, were also likely to be stayed, said David R. Dow of the Texas Defender Service, a nonprofit law clinic that worked on Mr. Chi’s appeal.
“Until the Court of Criminal Appeals addresses the questions raised in this case there will be no more executions in Texas,” predicted Mr. Dow, a law professor at the University of Houston.
Acting less than a week after it rejected another inmate’s appeal 5 to 4, the appeals court justices provided no breakdown of the vote and did not give any reasoning for their decision. But they directed the state’s director of criminal justice, Nathaniel Quarterman, not to execute Mr. Chi and gave Mr. Quarterman and Tim Curry, the district attorney of Tarrant County, where the crime had been committed, up to 30 days to respond to claims by Mr. Chi’s lawyers that the formulation and administration of chemicals used for lethal injections did not quickly and painlessly kill but paralyzed the condemned inmates while they painfully suffocated.
Earlier Tuesday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 4 to 3 against recommending a stay for Mr. Chi. A request for a 30-day reprieve was also pending with Gov. Rick Perry.
Had the appeals court not halted the execution, Mr. Chi’s lawyers would have taken the case to the United States Supreme Court, which last Thursday stayed the execution for another Texas inmate, Carlton Turner Jr.
Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., and a law professor at New York University, said the Supreme Court’s ruling was a sign that while it was reviewing the legality of lethal injection in a Kentucky case, “it was at least unseemly for states to be carrying out executions.”
Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham Law School, called the latest stay in Texas significant. “I do think Texas is reaching a turning point,” Ms. Denno said. “It’s not unusual throughout the country, but it is unusual in Texas. And not uncommonly when people are talking about the death penalty, there’s Texas and everywhere else, because Texas seems to be in its own death penalty world.”
But Diane Clements, president of Justice For All, a victims’ advocacy group in Texas, said the Supreme Court and the Texas appeals court gave no reasons for their rulings, “so we’re left here with no direction.”
The delays spelled more suffering for victims’ families, Ms. Clements said. “I’m sure family of that stayed-execution victim is on a roller coaster ride,” she said. “If there’s anything certain about the death penalty for families, it’s that it is very uncertain.”
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Published: October 3, 2007
HOUSTON, Oct. 2 — Signaling an indefinite halt to executions in Texas, the state’s highest criminal appeals court late Tuesday stayed the lethal injection of a 28-year-old Honduran man who was scheduled to be put to death Wednesday.
The reprieve by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals was granted a week after the United States Supreme Court agreed to consider whether a form of lethal injection constituted cruel and unusual punishment barred under the Eighth Amendment. On Thursday, the Supreme Court stepped in to halt a planned execution in Texas at the last minute, and though many legal experts interpreted that as a signal for all states to wait for a final ruling on lethal injection before any further executions, Texas officials said they planned to move ahead with more.
As a result, Tuesday’s ruling by the Texas court was seen as a sign that judges in the nation’s leading death penalty state were taking guidance from the Supreme Court and putting off imminent executions.
The Texas court order gave state authorities up to 30 days to explain in legal papers why the execution of the inmate, Heliberto Chi, should proceed. With responses then certain from defense lawyers, the effect of the order was to put off the execution for months, lawyers said.
Mr. Chi was convicted of killing the manager of a men’s store in Arlington in 2001.
Other executions, including four more scheduled in the next five months, were also likely to be stayed, said David R. Dow of the Texas Defender Service, a nonprofit law clinic that worked on Mr. Chi’s appeal.
“Until the Court of Criminal Appeals addresses the questions raised in this case there will be no more executions in Texas,” predicted Mr. Dow, a law professor at the University of Houston.
Acting less than a week after it rejected another inmate’s appeal 5 to 4, the appeals court justices provided no breakdown of the vote and did not give any reasoning for their decision. But they directed the state’s director of criminal justice, Nathaniel Quarterman, not to execute Mr. Chi and gave Mr. Quarterman and Tim Curry, the district attorney of Tarrant County, where the crime had been committed, up to 30 days to respond to claims by Mr. Chi’s lawyers that the formulation and administration of chemicals used for lethal injections did not quickly and painlessly kill but paralyzed the condemned inmates while they painfully suffocated.
Earlier Tuesday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 4 to 3 against recommending a stay for Mr. Chi. A request for a 30-day reprieve was also pending with Gov. Rick Perry.
Had the appeals court not halted the execution, Mr. Chi’s lawyers would have taken the case to the United States Supreme Court, which last Thursday stayed the execution for another Texas inmate, Carlton Turner Jr.
Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., and a law professor at New York University, said the Supreme Court’s ruling was a sign that while it was reviewing the legality of lethal injection in a Kentucky case, “it was at least unseemly for states to be carrying out executions.”
Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham Law School, called the latest stay in Texas significant. “I do think Texas is reaching a turning point,” Ms. Denno said. “It’s not unusual throughout the country, but it is unusual in Texas. And not uncommonly when people are talking about the death penalty, there’s Texas and everywhere else, because Texas seems to be in its own death penalty world.”
But Diane Clements, president of Justice For All, a victims’ advocacy group in Texas, said the Supreme Court and the Texas appeals court gave no reasons for their rulings, “so we’re left here with no direction.”
The delays spelled more suffering for victims’ families, Ms. Clements said. “I’m sure family of that stayed-execution victim is on a roller coaster ride,” she said. “If there’s anything certain about the death penalty for families, it’s that it is very uncertain.”
Monday, September 24, 2007
They Cried Wolf. They Were Right.
They Cried Wolf. They Were Right.
'The housing bubble would burst, they said. But prices kept going up. And up. So were they wrong, too?'In a way, he was two years too early. Had he waited until May 2006 when home prices in the Washington area peaked, his home would likely have appreciated by roughly 38 percent from its 2004 value, according to an index that tracks home prices in the metropolitan region.
The case of Mr. Baker, who now happily rents a similar condominium a few blocks away, serves as a useful illustration about the perils of calling and timing financial bubbles. It may be easy to spot an out-of-control market, as Mr. Baker and others did, but quite another to predict when one has truly gotten out of hand.
In a replay of the years before the tech-stock bubble burst in 2000, housing market skeptics have spent much of this decade being tarred as the boys who cried wolf. Their predictions were proved wrong year after year as people continued to bid up the price of condos in Miami and new houses in suburban Phoenix.
Academics and economists like Mr. Baker came across as gloomy sourpusses who did not want Americans to have fun and grow rich by flipping second homes on the New Jersey or Florida coasts.
“The naysayers simply look silly at the end of the bubble,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com who was among the experts raising questions about the underpinnings of the housing boom. “They are completely discounted and discredited because they have been saying things are askew for a year or two. It’s when the naysayers’ views have been completely discarded and discredited that the bubble inflates to its apex.”
Mr. Baker said he knew he would never be able to call the top of the real estate market precisely, either as a home seller or an economist. He noted that he was also too early in calling the tech bubble in 1997. “Sure it could go somewhat higher,” he said of the real estate market. But, he added, “I felt the need to talk about it, and do anything I could to bring attention to it.”
Some in the real estate industry say the early cries of bubble should be called to account on the grounds of intellectual fairness. If the boosters have to acknowledge they were wrong when they provided justifications for prices that were, well, unjustifiable, then the doubters should also own up to the fact that they were too negative, too early.
“Even the people that were talking about booms busting, my goodness they were talking about it in 2001 and 2002,” said David Lereah, the former chief economist with the National Association of Realtors. “And they were wrong for four years and they only became right at the end of 2004.” He and his former employer had been criticized for the optimistic forecasts they made during the boom.
Economists, even the famous ones, mostly see the to and fro between the housing bulls and bears as an academic debate. Their influence over markets and the behavior of consumers, they say, was and is at best marginal.
Robert J. Shiller, the Yale economist whose book “Irrational Exuberance” became required reading for bubble watchers, has said that there is a long tradition of naysaying in the face of soaring markets to little effect.
Newspapers during the boom in the 1990s and in the early years of this decade expressed warnings about the housing market, along with more upbeat sentiments. But the critical voices often did not register above the din of the frenzied market.
“You got some of us sitting there in a distance saying that this is a bubble, we don’t know when its going to end,” said Christopher F. Thornberg, an independent economist who is based in Los Angeles. “And then you have mortgage brokers and real estate agents who are much closer to the buyer who are whispering in their ear that, well, yeah, there are some markets that are out of line but not this neighborhood.”
Almost everyone would agree that of far greater import to the timing and performance of bubbles are interest rates and the availability of credit. Both are set by the market, but regulators at the Federal Reserve exert significant influence over them. The main discussion now, with the benefit of hindsight, is whether the central bank should have taken a more muscular approach in regulating mortgage lending and raised interest rates sooner. (After the tech bubble burst, the Fed cut its benchmark rate sharply and left it at 1 percent from the summer of 2003 to the summer of 2004.)
In recent interviews, Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman, has argued he did not realize the extent of reckless lending practices in 2005 and 2006. He also defended the central bank’s decision to keep short-term interest rates low early in this decade to avert the risk of deflation.
Last week, the Fed cut rates sharply to ease conditions in the credit market, kindling some fears of inflation.
“We have had two bubbles in the last 10 years,” noted Allen L. Sinai, the president and chief economist at Decision Economics, a consulting firm based in New York. “The only way I would say it won’t happen — and this is arguable — is for the central bank to do something about it before it gets too far, and right now the central bank’s religion is not to interfere.
'The housing bubble would burst, they said. But prices kept going up. And up. So were they wrong, too?'In a way, he was two years too early. Had he waited until May 2006 when home prices in the Washington area peaked, his home would likely have appreciated by roughly 38 percent from its 2004 value, according to an index that tracks home prices in the metropolitan region.
The case of Mr. Baker, who now happily rents a similar condominium a few blocks away, serves as a useful illustration about the perils of calling and timing financial bubbles. It may be easy to spot an out-of-control market, as Mr. Baker and others did, but quite another to predict when one has truly gotten out of hand.
In a replay of the years before the tech-stock bubble burst in 2000, housing market skeptics have spent much of this decade being tarred as the boys who cried wolf. Their predictions were proved wrong year after year as people continued to bid up the price of condos in Miami and new houses in suburban Phoenix.
Academics and economists like Mr. Baker came across as gloomy sourpusses who did not want Americans to have fun and grow rich by flipping second homes on the New Jersey or Florida coasts.
“The naysayers simply look silly at the end of the bubble,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com who was among the experts raising questions about the underpinnings of the housing boom. “They are completely discounted and discredited because they have been saying things are askew for a year or two. It’s when the naysayers’ views have been completely discarded and discredited that the bubble inflates to its apex.”
Mr. Baker said he knew he would never be able to call the top of the real estate market precisely, either as a home seller or an economist. He noted that he was also too early in calling the tech bubble in 1997. “Sure it could go somewhat higher,” he said of the real estate market. But, he added, “I felt the need to talk about it, and do anything I could to bring attention to it.”
Some in the real estate industry say the early cries of bubble should be called to account on the grounds of intellectual fairness. If the boosters have to acknowledge they were wrong when they provided justifications for prices that were, well, unjustifiable, then the doubters should also own up to the fact that they were too negative, too early.
“Even the people that were talking about booms busting, my goodness they were talking about it in 2001 and 2002,” said David Lereah, the former chief economist with the National Association of Realtors. “And they were wrong for four years and they only became right at the end of 2004.” He and his former employer had been criticized for the optimistic forecasts they made during the boom.
Economists, even the famous ones, mostly see the to and fro between the housing bulls and bears as an academic debate. Their influence over markets and the behavior of consumers, they say, was and is at best marginal.
Robert J. Shiller, the Yale economist whose book “Irrational Exuberance” became required reading for bubble watchers, has said that there is a long tradition of naysaying in the face of soaring markets to little effect.
Newspapers during the boom in the 1990s and in the early years of this decade expressed warnings about the housing market, along with more upbeat sentiments. But the critical voices often did not register above the din of the frenzied market.
“You got some of us sitting there in a distance saying that this is a bubble, we don’t know when its going to end,” said Christopher F. Thornberg, an independent economist who is based in Los Angeles. “And then you have mortgage brokers and real estate agents who are much closer to the buyer who are whispering in their ear that, well, yeah, there are some markets that are out of line but not this neighborhood.”
Almost everyone would agree that of far greater import to the timing and performance of bubbles are interest rates and the availability of credit. Both are set by the market, but regulators at the Federal Reserve exert significant influence over them. The main discussion now, with the benefit of hindsight, is whether the central bank should have taken a more muscular approach in regulating mortgage lending and raised interest rates sooner. (After the tech bubble burst, the Fed cut its benchmark rate sharply and left it at 1 percent from the summer of 2003 to the summer of 2004.)
In recent interviews, Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman, has argued he did not realize the extent of reckless lending practices in 2005 and 2006. He also defended the central bank’s decision to keep short-term interest rates low early in this decade to avert the risk of deflation.
Last week, the Fed cut rates sharply to ease conditions in the credit market, kindling some fears of inflation.
“We have had two bubbles in the last 10 years,” noted Allen L. Sinai, the president and chief economist at Decision Economics, a consulting firm based in New York. “The only way I would say it won’t happen — and this is arguable — is for the central bank to do something about it before it gets too far, and right now the central bank’s religion is not to interfere.
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
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