Carlton Turner - TX

10th July 2008



Read some information about Carlton Turner here....

Visit Carlton Turner's TDCJ information here....

You can e-mail Governor Rick Perry at his website: http://www.governor.state.tx.us/contact

phone: (512) 463 2000
fax: (512) 463 1849



other Texas contacts:

Pardons and Paroles
phone: (512) 406 5852
fax: (512) 467 0945

Austin American Statesman
e-dress: letters@statesman.com

phone: (512) 445-3667
fax: (512) 445-3679

Houston Chronicle
e-dress: hci@chron.com
phone: (713) 220-7491



I ask you, Governor Perry, to help stop your state's execution of Carlton Turner, Jr. Mr. Turner is scheduled to die next Thursday, 07/10/2008, for the 1998 murders of Carlton Turner Sr., and Tonya Turner, his adopted parents.



Mr. Turner’s history is a prime example of the truism that ‘violence begets violence’. His short life has been filled with violence, starting with horrific abuse at the hands of his parents. Compounding the psychoses brought on by such violence, the last time your state tried to execute him you prolonged his time of terror by four hours after his scheduled execution before a stay was issued. Governor Perry, on humanitarian grounds Texas may not execute Carlton Turner!



Former Attorney General of the United States Janet Reno, as well as myriads of scholars, can find no evidence that the death penalty deters capital crimes. In fact, the warden of the famous Sing Sing prison believes that the death penalty exacerbates the violence in his facility by setting an example of cold-blooded killing. Recent studies show that the largest increase in capital crimes is in Texas, the state which executes the most people. As for vengeance, that is the Lord's, not the government's.

Please, Governor Perry, help stop this killing of Carlton Turner, Jr. If this execution goes forward, look around this country for the black armbands worn, and the church bells tolled, in protest of this injustice.

Thank you.

Man who killed parents facing execution Thursday

By MICHAEL GRACZYK Associated Press Writer

HUNTSVILLE, Texas — Attorneys for condemned Texas inmate Carlton Turner asked the U.S. Supreme Court to delay his scheduled punishment Thursday evening for the slayings of his parents a decade ago at their suburban Dallas home.

Turner was being returned to a small cell just outside the Texas death chamber for the second time in 10 months while the high court considered appeals to spare him.

Last September, about four hours after he could have been given lethal injection, the justices gave him a reprieve in the wake of their decision to review whether lethal injection procedures may be unconstitutionally cruel. When the court upheld the method earlier this year, Turner's execution was reset for Thursday.

He would be the second Texas inmate executed this year. At least a dozen others are set to die over the next few months, including two more this month.

In a long rambling message on an anti-death penalty Web site, Turner noted his reprieve last year wasn't even based on his own case, that the courts didn't have to stop his punishment and that he had lived because of faith in God.

"Faith is all I had to stand on and the trust that God would put me where I needed to be," he wrote.

Turner acknowledged fatally shooting his adoptive parents, then making things worse by telling the jury at his trial that it didn't matter to him if they gave him life in prison or death.

The jury chose death.

"I was immature and arrogant," Turner, who turned 29 last week, told The Associated Press from death row. "I look at life as it is, that these are the cards I'm dealt with. To tell the truth, I'm not sad at all."

But he said he was sorry for the shootings, which he said were prompted by anger and hatred.

"I still loved them," he said. "What I did was wrong. There was a time when I had justification, but that's all wrong."

Turner, who was adopted as an infant, said he shot his father, 43-year-old Carlton Turner Sr., in self-defense after repeated instances of abuse.

"I felt my mother couldn't live without my father," he said, explaining why he killed his mother, Tonya, 40.

His lawyers wanted the Supreme Court to delay the execution so he could get a federally appointed and paid attorney to pursue clemency. They also argued the Texas lethal injection procedures needed to be more thoroughly reviewed.

On Wednesday, his lawyers lost an attempt to have his execution date withdrawn when a state district judge in Dallas refused to grant them more time to investigate claims his trial may have been unfair because jurors improperly were selected on the basis of race. Turner is black and his attorneys alleged the entire jury pool may have been racially selected.

"He was convicted by an all-white jury by what we contend was an extraordinarily discriminatory jury selection practice in a county that has a very long well-documented history of race discrimination in jury selection," said Maurie Levin, a University of Texas law professor representing Turner. "I'm extremely disappointed the court couldn't see fit to wait 90 days to permit us the extra time to explore the claim."

Turner had been a disciplinary problem as a juvenile and at age 14 sexually assaulted an 8-year-old boy. His parents were retired from the Air Force and moved to the Dallas area about a year before the killings. His father worked in sales. His mother worked at a department store.

Evidence showed after the slayings he bought new clothes and jewelry, continued living in the family's Irving home, dragged the bodies into the garage, then threw a party at the house for friends.

Neighbors called police after they hadn't seen the couple in several days and saw Turner acting strangely and driving his parents' cars, something his parents prohibited. He was arrested at home on warrants for outstanding traffic violations. Police were led to the bodies by a foul smell coming from the garage.

"He had such a callous attitude and it didn't bother him at all," said Toby Shook, one of the prosecutors at his trial. "The parents did their best and they wind up dead. He murders them."

Scheduled to die next in Texas is Derrick Sonnier, set for execution July 23 for the 1991 slayings of Melody Flowers, 27, and her 2-year-old son, Patrick, at their apartment in the Houston suburb of Humble.

(Source: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/5881127.html)

Sanders: Another troubling Dallas case


The case of Carlton Akee Turner, who is scheduled for the Texas death chamber Thursday evening, presents the state and its noble citizens a whole set of conundrums:

What really should be done with troubled youths who commit horrible crimes?

Do we truly care about the feelings of the victims' families and how they view "closure"?

How should our highest criminal court deal with cases from Dallas County particularly, with its history of racism, terribly flawed investigations and what some see as true "criminal" prosecution tactics of the recent past?

At what point do the people of Texas say "enough is enough" when it comes to capital punishment, even for those who committed a crime, as Turner most certainly did?

Many of you will remember the case of the Irving teenager arrested and charged with murdering his own parents, 2 revered people in the community who had adopted him as an 11-month-old baby.

The news shocked North Texas, and many people were asking at the time, "How could he have done that?" That question still haunts Turner family members, many of whom want to see the young man's life spared.

Turner, called "Akee" by family members, was born on an Indian reservation in Utah on Independence Day, 1979, according to a clemency petition filed with the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles by representatives of the University of Texas School of Law Capital Punishment Clinic.

"As a child of a Native American woman and a black man, he was not accepted by his mother's tribe," the petition said.

Carlton Turner Sr. and his wife, Tonya, and the child moved around the country because of the elder Turner's military career. And they often visited family in Pennsylvania together.

Other family members saw a happy couple with a delightfully "cute" child — a stable household with no problems.

But, according to the petition, "While Tonya and Carlton presented the picture of a happy well adjusted family, troubles started at an early age. Akee exhibited learning and behavioral problems as early as elementary school. These continued throughout his school years. His problems were only exacerbated by his father's strict and abusive punishments. He suffered broken fingers, cuts, bruises and a broken leg (after his father threw him to the ground when he was seven years old), and endured many trips to the hospital as a result of his father's punishment."

Turner, 19 at the time he shot his parents, testified about the abuse and said he killed his father in self-defense. He said he didn't know why he killed his mother.

After the shooting, he dragged their bodies to the garage, where police found them three days later after obtaining a search warrant.

The facts about the crime were presented in court and don't really play a part in the requests for clemency, something rarely granted in Texas under any circumstance.

Maurie Levin, an attorney with the UT law school's Capital Punishment Clinic, argues in the petition and a supplement that Turner's sentence should be commuted to life on two grounds: Dallas County's history (including in this case) of excluding black people from juries in capital cases, and the fact that relatives of his dead parents — also members of his family — don't want him executed.

Turner was convicted by an all-white jury, and anecdotal evidence suggests that no black people even made it to the voir dire (or questioning) part of jury selection. Jurors who expressed reservations about capital punishment on their questionnaires, a disproportionate number being African-American, were rejected "despite the fact that they may have been legally qualified to serve," the attorney said in her supplement to the petition.

Because of the practice of excluding blacks from capital cases in Dallas County, both prosecutors and defense lawyers were complicit in this tainted procedure, the petition says. "The capital prosecution of an African American man by an all white jury from a jurisdiction with such an extensive record of discrimination in exactly that arena should cause doubts in the first instance," the petition said. "Where . . . there is evidence of a deeper level of discrimination that is, by its nature, well camouflaged, a call for a halt to Mr. Turner's scheduled execution is compelled, at least until further investigation can be conducted."

Noting a quote from Gov. Rick Perry that we "never forget the impact felt by crime victims," the attorney points out that the "vast majority" of Tony and Carlton Turner Sr.'s family members do not want to see the couple's son executed.

"Executions are held out as a talisman that will provide the victim with closure," said the petition. "This belief serves in part as a rationale for executions. But, in Mr. Turner's case, an 'eye for an eye' truly does leave a family blind, twice robbed of their own."

Affidavits from 3 family members were submitted with the petition.

Kelly Johnson of Philadelphia, Tonya's brother, wrote: "I do not wish to see my sister's only child executed. I believe in my heart that my sister would only have wanted Akee to receive the help that he needed to restore his mind to a sound state."

Tonya Turner's first cousin and close friend, Krishell Coleman of Lawrenceville, Ga., said, "I don't think Carlton should be executed. I don't want him to be executed. Now that I know more of the details that led to the murders, I realize that he needs help. Killing him is just another murder. Nothing is going to bring my cousin back. Killing him will just hurt our family again, the way Tonya and Carlton's murders did."

The Board of Pardons and Paroles should recommend that the governor commute the sentence, and Perry should heed that advice.

(source: Fort Worth Star-Telegram; Bob Ray Sanders' column appears Sundays and Wednesdays)

Carlton Akee Turner
4th July 1979 - 10th July 2008
R.I.P

"First of all I would like to tell my Uncle Kyle that I am sorry. I have been sorry for the last 10 years for what I did. I wish you could accept my apology. I know you can't accept my apology, I know you can't give your forgiveness; it's okay and I understand. I have done what I could to heal the rest of the family. I wish that someday you could come to terms and understand. I know I was wrong; I accept responsibility as a man. I take this penalty as a man. This doesn't solve anything, 'cause it hurts others that love me. I am sorry. I love you Kjersti. I love you too Roland. I love you too Uncle Kyle; I am still your nephew, no matter what you believe."