NEW HELL HOLE NEWS
NOVEMBER 10, 2012
New Hell Hole News - #35 November 10, 2012 Hey Y’all… It’s been quite a while since I wrote anything. Hate to leave a vacuum but after another almost execution date 11/09/11 and losing two of my somewhat best friends to the executioner’s needle and other events related to Brewer’s (999327) last meal, I just needed to get back and try to reassess the events of the last few years and gain some perspective. They say you go through five stages of grief when you lose someone you care about: denial/disbelief, anger, making deals with God, acceptance, som’like that. Losing “Budders” and “Third” (our nicknames for Russell Brewer 999327 and Steven Wood 999427) within eight (8) days of each other was supremely hard on me. I tend not to get close to people anymore, but these characters were a constant in my life and I’d spent a lot of time living beside or close to, Brewer especially. It has caused me a lot of grief and loss of friends out there to be associated with Brewer, due to the horrific nature of his case – the dragging dismemberment of James Byrd, who was black. People love to hate and this sort of crime brings out the rawest emotions in any who confront it. All I can say is I am very sorry Mr. Byrd died as he did, but what has been presented to the public by authorities over the years does not represent the reality of what actually happened that night. I won’t belabor it with a retelling of the entire saga but the short of it is, Brewer had no involvement in or, say over, what went down; it wasn’t racially motivated but financially driven. Brewer had not active involvement. He was just along for the ride and later he refused to snitch. That was his death sentence and it got him killed. If any of you out there had known Russell as I did, you’d know the same truth I do. He was very child-like personality but also very gregarious and funny. Everyone who knew him here, whites and blacks alike, Hispanics too, liked him and liked to be around him. If there was ever a person who was wrongly maligned by the system and the media, it was Russell “Budders” Brewer 999327. R.I.P. The only other thing I want to say about this is it was Shawn Berry’s truck, it was Shawn Berry’s chain, it was Shawn Berry’s knife that cut James Byrd’s throat – allegedly over $800,00 of steroids Byrd burned Berry for it was Shawn Berry who attached the chain to Byrd’s dead body and Shawn Berry who drove the truck pulling Byrd’s corpse down the road. None of those facts are really disputed at all. John King #999295 was not even present. His lighter with name engraved was left in the truck and another person wearing his flip-flops left them at King’s apartment after the fact. That brought his death sentence. Shawn Berry snitched and the only thing worse than a snitch is a lying snitch. Shawn Berry is both and he traded two innocent men’s lives, sold them to the executioner for a reduced sentence for himself. The murder occurred on property owned by Berry’s family. I was shocked and saddened beyond words ability to describe over the level of hatred, snobbery, ridicule, condemnation and bigoted inflammatory statements directed at Brewer in the last days of his life and it broke my heart to see him reduced to a noncommunicative depressed lump lying in his bunk awaiting death and knowing there was not a damned thing I could do for him. Still, I tried. I wrote to so many D.P. defense lawyers asking them to help, but they all seemed consigned to just accept Brewer’s fate. Even people in the abolitionist community spewed hate towards Brewer and I had a falling out with one prominent member of an abolitionist group whom I’ve known and loved almost 15 years. Just before this happened, that Brewer got a date, she was in conflict with another prominent abolitionist over the decision not to carry out a more public protest over the imminent execution of Peter Cantu #999093. Her statements to me at the time were: “If we’re against the death penalty, we’re against the F%@?HN’ death penalty for anybody and everybody!! Not just the ones who’re publicly productive, but all of them, regardless of race, crime, looks, actions, etc. All!! And we need to be there for them, regardless!” I agree. I reminded her of this statement when I started trying to talk about Brewer. “Oh no, not him!” she would not apply that same logic to that case, Oh no. The hell with him, let him die! Pretty much the same thing happened with “Third”, Steven Woods. Except in his case, it wasn’t race but class. He went along on a drug deal with an acquaintance whose father was a prominent member of the community. The acquaintance pulled a gun and killed the would-be sellers, took the dope and money. Third had no foreknowledge this guy was going to kill anyone. He had zero participation in the act. His only “mistake” was who he was with and the fact that he refused to snitch. That brought him death. Neither of these people, Brewer or Woods, committed any physical act of murder or, any act at all, that could’ve gotten them convicted of murder by the law of parties, much less capital murder. Yet they are both deader than four o’clock, murdered by the state. That’s been hard for me to deal with.
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I have always held the belief that, if the citizenry out there understood what goes on with the death penalty and how it works in reality and practice, no one would be in favor of it. But no matter how I try, I cannot get this across to people out there. It’s because they simply have no life experiences to compare to this, so they cannot truly even begin to comprehend it. And more importantly, their conditioning won’t let them accept the reality of it even if they can comprehend it. As one of my friends here (executed 03/07/07 R.I.P.) Joseph Nichols-Bey used to say: “young people in school are taught what to think, not how to think”. Everyone wants to believe the good guys always win, “justice” always prevails, cops are totally honest, always do good, we can trust them, they are our friends. Prosecutors only prosecute the guilty and they’re always right. If the defendant (criminal!) did not do it, he/she wouldn’t be here on trial or, in prison or, on death row, etc. Right? My former pastor and friend Albert Maggard is a perfect example. He was personally and intimately acquainted with the lessthan-stellar conduct of the sheriff of the time of my arrest and trial. Yet, in just a few short years, he was persuaded otherwise by his conditioning and returned to his former views – see above paragraph. He succumbed to blue suits and peer pressures within his congregation. I’ll be the first to admit too, though, once I saw this coming on more strongly and evidently, I hastened it by creating arguments and disagreements, etc. And, in fact, I had predicted this ultimate outcome a few years before it actually happened because I saw the beginnings of it and could easily recognize if for what it was. The short of it is, agents of the state began to convince him to abandon “that Ol’ nasty criminal Skinner” and after he went on Larry King and was accosted by that lying kook Tara Bradley, then suffered the wrath of his congregation for “defending a killer”, when his livelihood at the collection place was threatened, it was time to get out. Really I hated to see this happen but my pastor and his wife are getting older and I want them to be able to enjoy the rest of their lives, their golden years, without the pressures, stress and tensions, conflicts and drama that goes with being at the helm of the HSDF, aka the Hank Skinner fan club. People often ask me, “if you’re innocent, how did this happen to you?” I’ve always answered that question with technical explanations relating to the evidence, the trial, problems with limitations in the appeal process and people’s inherent tendency to always assume the worst of someone, their love affair with “the dark side” of anything. Today, I can give you a one-word answer to that question: humans. Humans are fallible creatures born of will and often, in exercising that will, make horrible mistakes. Ego: “I’ve got to be right!” Wherever will intercedes over logic, bad things happen. I’m living, maybe soon to be dead, proof of that maxim. Why do people love to hate? That’s just how it appears to us, the victims of that hatred, or more correctly, the objects of their righteous condemnation. With some people like Dudley Sharp, Diane Clements and Andy Khan, it is pathologically controlling. These are people who despise in others what they see in themselves and project it outwardly upon others, as a purgative pressure relief. Others just need context. A measuring stick “whatever my shortcomings are, at least I’m not like that. Thank God”. They think I learned this by reading serial killer thrillers and true crime novels. One day I overheard the mail clerks delivering some of this genre of books to me, talking about it. They thought I like these books because I identify with the characters in them. This really hurt and upset me. The police in my case spent quite some time trying to convince me that I committed this crime when I knew damned well I did not do it. First they suggested it was somehow justifiable and tried to empathize with me as a means to get me to confess. When that didn’t work, they resorted to darker methods of suggestion that to this day I’m still working to unravel. They set up an inner doubt that haunted me terribly. “Could I have, somehow??? And maybe I just don’t remember it??” They left me isolated in the back of the jail for weeks afterward and wouldn’t let me see any newspapers, use the phone, etc. Every once in a while, they’d come back there to announce: “well, we know…” this or that. “Are you ready to tell us what you did and why? It’s going to come out, you might as well make it easy on yourself, Skinner”… Dudley Sharp says: “there are two confessions Skinner made”. No, there are not. That is a lie. The lead investigator on the case, Terry Young, told the Houston Chronicle in 2000 that I never confessed. As the district attorney of that time, John Mann, later admitted in federal court from the witness stand when he was called to testify in my November 2005 evidentiary hearing, that Terry Young blatantly violated all my constitutional rights under Miranda, Massiah and several other precedential U.S. Supreme Court cases trying to get me to confess. To no avail. 2
The second thing, after “humans”. As my answer to “how’d this happen to you?”, is: people lie for “a good cause” and feel justified in doing it. This was supposed to be only an introduction to the following July 6, 2012 story by Edward Lane of the Wichita Falls Law Enforcement Examiner about my case and my commentary on it. Almost every statement this man makes is a blatant lie and is flatly contradicted by and, in conflict with, the public record. It is beyond obvious that Lane is heavily prejudiced and biased against me, Brad Love’s false “memories” of that nigh are spurring Lane on. In a small town, this kind of inflammatory yellow journalism will get you killed. So how’d it happen? People like Edward Lane, that’s how. The NHHN #36 will review this in detail I read serial killer books in order to try to differentiate myself from those who do stuff like that. I get comfort from those books because they show me I have nothing to worry about, I’m not like that. I am very repulsed and sickened by the acts committed in those books, so I know I’m ok. And I get all kinds of ideas about evidence, testing methods, legal procedures, etc. I would think that the evidence and methods used to prove them guilty could conversely be used to prove me innocent. I hope. They’re right now testing the DNA evidence in my case. I hope it proves me innocent once and for all. Scientifically, and a as matter of logical fact, it should prove me innocent. But that’s no guarantee it will: humans, remember. Humans who want to impose their will on the outcome, who want to be right, no matter what, by any means necessary. That’s what we’ve been forced to deal with in the past, but this isn’t the DA’s people in small town Pampa, this is the AG and Texas DPS lab. So I’m hopeful we’re dealing with higher caliber of people this time. We’ll see. In the meantime, check out the story by Edward Lane that will follow soon. My best regards to you all, Hank 999143 Polunsky Unit H W Hank Skinner 3872 FM 350 South Livingston TX 77351-8580 h.w.skinner@gmail.com http://www.hankskinner.org Facebook http://on.fb.me/Justice4Hank Twitter http://twitter.com/Justice4Hank Newsletter http://eepurl.com/cYCIE For those of you who use JPay to write, don’t forget to always include your postal address and your e-mail address after your signature, so I can reply. www.jpay.com don’t forget to enter my TDC number as an 8-digit number: 00999143.
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