Paul House’s retrial has been extended once again. Now, the House case is set for June 1, 2009, almost a year after he was released from prison on bail. Thanks to an anonymous donor, House was released but has been on house arrest since that time.

Paul House was convicted of the 1985 murder of Carolyn Muncey. In 2007 DNA evidence brought to question House’s participation in the tragic killing. The trial was set for last October, then reset to March 3o and now the defense has requested a continuance in order for them to perform further DNA tests on the evidence including: fingernail clippings, a cigarette butt, and a pair of jeans. This evidence has been in the hands of prosecution for years and now the defense is taking the next 45 days to test and evaluate the evidence in order to rule out all past suspects in the crime, as well as, Paul.

TCASK has worked closely with Paul and his family over the past few years as they continue to struggle to secure his innocence and freedom. We are hopeful that this further testing brings good news for Paul House but recognize that the court ruled for a timely retrial in 2007 and the preparation process is continually lengthening the resolution to this crime.

Knoxville WBIR.com’s Story on the extension: Click Here

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I have not had the time nor the energy to attempt to write anything here before today. The past week has been one of the most painful and most holy of my life, and it will take me a very long time to deal with all that has happened. Looking back, I guess that I lived in denial for a very long time about Steve’s possible execution. When you have known someone for 10 years, it just seems too incredible that one day, the state will strap him down to a gurney and kill him.

In the days leading up to the execution, I continued to believe that someone would intervene…the courts, the Governor, someone would look at all the serious problems with this case and stop this execution. But, no one did. And so I was faced with helping my friend to prepare for his death and helping his suffering family to endure it.

As most of you have probably now read, Steve was the most at peace I had ever experienced him in the hours prior to his execution. We spent the hours from 9-11 p.m. sharing stories, talking about God’s presence in suffering, reading Scripture, praying, and sharing the Lord’s Supper together. When it was time for me to go, we tried to hug through the bars that separated us, and I gave him a kiss on the cheek. I told him that God had given me some measure of peace by the way he was facing his death, and he told me not to let this whole ordeal scar me.

Then, a few hours later, I watched my friend attempt to lighten the mood in the execution chamber as he made a joke about how pitiful we all looked and stuck his tongue out at his kids. After his heartfelt words about his concern for the Stafford family, for the pain Fred and Edna Stafford has gone through, and after again, asserting his innocence as he had for 23 years, Warden Bell said, “Proceed.”

Steve lifted his head and said, “I feel it coming.” As his head feel back and he began to make a loud snoring sound, I grabbed his sister sitting next to me and reached my hand over her to put it on his son’s shoulder. I closed my eyes tightly and the words of the Lord’s Prayer began pouring out of me as I struggled and as Steve struggled. I wanted Steve to hear those familiar and comforting words over the wailing of his kids, and I wanted to drown out any sound coming from that room where my friend was dying.

We buried Steve on Saturday at his home place in Gainesboro. He was buried next to his beloved grandparents and his brother David who was murdered while Steve was in prison. I, like Steve, hope that this horrible nightmare brings peace to the Stafford family, but I am hard pressed to see how so much suffering inflicted on the Henley family can possibly bring anyone any peace.

For now, I will try to heal and remember my friend by telling his story and through the work that I am doing to end this awful death penalty. The last thing I said to Steve before the poison flowed was, “Steve, I am never going to quit.” He raised his head with a smile and said, “I am counting on that.” Steve, none of us will quit until the death penalty is abolished. And yes, you can count on that.

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Sita Diehl, Director of National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) TN and a member of the Tennessee Committee to Study the Administration of the Death Penalty, recently proposed that the Committee recommend legislation exempting people suffering with severe mental illness at the time of their crimes from the death sentence. This recommendation still allows for a guilty verdict and a sentence of life without parole, but it takes death off the table for a population of people who, like those with mental retardation, are less culpable for their crimes because of their diminished capacity.

Unfortunately, the Committee chose to recommend that this issue be studied further rather than take decisive action now. During the Committee’s discussion, the prosecutors on the Committee stated that the current system has mechanisms in place for dealing with people who have severe mental illness and that this recommendation was only creating more bureaucracy and more potential litigation. The prosecutors’ position prevailed.

On Friday of last week, I read a story out of Texas that demonstrates the complete lack of substance to the argument that the current system is effective in dealing with those with severe mental illness. The case is that of Andre Thomas, 25, who was convicted in 2004 for the slayings of his estranged wife, their young son, and her 13-month-old daughter, in a gruesome stabbing in which Thomas cut out the victims’ hearts, stabbed himself, and then walked into the Sherman, TX, police station to report what he had done.

While at the Grayson County jail in Sherman, Thomas plucked out his right eye before his trial in 2004. A judge subsequently ruled that Thomas was competent to stand trial, and he received the death sentence.

On December 9, 2008, a death row officer in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice found Thomas in his cell with blood all over his face and took him to the infirmary where it was determined that he had pulled his remaining eye out and ingested it. He was treated at East Texas Medical Center in Tyler and transferred to the prison psychiatric facility.

“He will finally be able to receive the mental health care that we had wanted and begged for from day 1,” stated his attorney Bobbie Peterson-Cate. So much for competency.

How a supposedly rational person, such as the judge in this case, can witness a man in his/her courtroom who is so ill that he cut the heart out of his own child and plucked out his own eye and then find that man competent to stand trial and receive a death sentence is beyond my ability to understand. What has happened to us as a society when it takes a man pulling his only remaining eye from his own head and eating it to decide he might need some psychiatric help?

This case demonstrates just how woefully inadequate the current system is in determining when someone is suffering from severe mental illness and how best to address the issue. Or even worse, this case demonstrates that we, as a society, simply do not have the will to address the real problems but instead prefer to rid ourselves of such people. Certainly, this is an extreme case which makes it all the more shocking that this very sick man got no help.

I hope that we in Tennessee can take an honest look at our current system and have the humanity and decency to at least, identify those individuals who are the most ill and then treat them, not kill them. Currently, Tennessee has people who suffer with severe mental illness on our death row. What is it going to take for us to do the right thing and exempt these very sick people from the death penalty?

Read more here.

Fairly, there are numerous aspects you would like to think about medications. All discount medicaments save money, but few online drugstores offer better deals than other online drugstores. There isn’t anything you can’t order online anymore. Remedies like Deltasone ordinarily is used to treat diseases such as eye problems. Glucocorticoids naturally occurring steroids, which are easily absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract. There are varied drugs for every conditions. Cialis is a remedy prescribed to treat many illnesses. What do you already know about long term side effects of cialis? What consumers talk about how long does it take for cialis to take effect? A general sexual complaint among men is the erectile disfunction. Sexual problems mostly signal deeper problems: low libido or erectile dysfunction can be the symptom a strong soundness problem such as core trouble. Albeit the erectile malfunction itself isn’t necessarily dangerous, erectile disfunction is sometimes one of the early warning symptoms of other underlying health conditions that can be much dangerous. Unfortunately nearly all over-the-counter medicines have sometimes dangerous aftereffects, from muscle aches to death. If you buy any erectile disfunction medicaments like Cialis, check with a physician that they are sure to take with your other drugs. Do not take unwanted medications. Take Cialis to your local chemist’s shop which will dispose of them for you.

After spending over two decades on death row Paul House was able to spend his 47th birthday and the 2008 Christmas holidays, at home, with his family. Because of the rarity of Paul’s case Channel 4 did a brief news piece on the House family’s holiday celebration: http://www.wsmv.com/news/18360998/detail.html

The retrial of the House case is currently set for March 30, 2009.

Fairly, there are numerous aspects you would like to think about medications. All discount medicaments save money, but few online drugstores offer better deals than other online drugstores. There isn’t anything you can’t order online anymore. Remedies like Deltasone ordinarily is used to treat diseases such as eye problems. Glucocorticoids naturally occurring steroids, which are easily absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract. There are varied drugs for every conditions. Cialis is a remedy prescribed to treat many illnesses. What do you already know about long term side effects of cialis? What consumers talk about how long does it take for cialis to take effect? A general sexual complaint among men is the erectile dysfunction. Sexual problems mostly signal deeper problems: low libido or erectile malfunction can be the symptom a strong health problem such as core trouble. Albeit the erectile disfunction itself isn’t necessarily dangerous, erectile malfunction is sometimes one of the early warning symptoms of other underlying health conditions that can be very much dangerous. Unfortunately nearly all over-the-counter medicines have sometimes dangerous aftereffects, from muscle aches to death. If you buy any erectile dysfunction medicaments like Cialis, check with a physician that they are sure to take with your other drugs. Do not take unwanted medications. Take Cialis to your local chemist’s shop which will dispose of them for you.

I am sitting in my office on Tuesday afternoon, December 23, and all the staff has left for the holiday. I am going through the piles of paper on my desk to be sure I haven’t missed anything too monumental before I head home for Christmas.

And, I decided that I need to reflect for just a few minutes on the year that was. This year has been a bit of a roller coaster ride, but what’s new for the work of abolition? TCASK’s biggest achievement of 2008 has to be Paul House’s release on July 2nd. Watching that van drive through the rows of barbed wire at DeBerry Special Needs facility and into the parking lot with Paul House sitting in the back seat, eating a candy bar and drinking a Pepsi, unshackled and wearing free world clothes–that is a sight that I won’t soon forget.

After so many people worked for so long to secure his freedom, after an anonymous donor posted the bail money, to stand there in that parking lot and watch Paul ride off with Joyce toward home….home. Words cannot really describe it.

Christmas 2008 will be Paul’s first Christmas with his family in 22 years. I give thanks to God and to all of you who helped get him home. What a gift!

I also want to reflect for a moment on my friend, Steve Henley, who is scheduled to be executed on February 4, 2009. I began visiting Steve almost 10 years ago through the Visitor on Death Row Program, long before I became the Executive Director of TCASK. I haven’t written much about Steve since his date was set because I still can’t believe this is really happening. I was with Steve’s daughter yesterday for just a short time when she came by the office, and as tears rolled down her face when talking about her Dad, I had to look away for a minute. It was just too much raw pain for me to take.

Here at Christmas time, I think about lots of people. I think about Carolyn Muncey, the woman for whose murder Paul House has spent the last 22 years on death row. I think about Carolyn’s family and what they have been through and all the Christmas’s with her they have missed. I think about the brokenness of a system that would rather maintain a conviction at all costs than admit a mistake and seek the truth in how Carolyn Muncey died and who is responsible.

I think about Fred and Edna Stafford, the elderly couple who Steve Henley is convicted of killing. I think of their families at Christmas time and the empty places at the table where Fred and Edna would be sitting for Christmas dinner. I think about how senseless violence is.

And yet all the pain that these families have suffered somehow cannot justify the pain that the Henley family now suffers as they await Steve’s execution. His family has committed no crime. To see Steve’s grandkids grieve as they struggle to understand how their own state could kill their “Gramps.” To see Steve’s elderly parents–two hardworking and kind citizens of Tennessee–with tears rolling down their faces as they ask questions about what is happening with their son’s case, my heart breaks open a little wider every day.

My prayer this Christmas is that we, as a people, find other ways to deal with the violence and grief around us, ways that do not inflict more of the same onto other families. As people of various faiths celebrate the light which comes into the world during this season, may we let that light lead us, coming out of the shadows and embodying a better way of living together. This is my prayer for all of us.

Fairly, there are numerous aspects you would like to think about medications. All discount medicaments save money, but few online drugstores offer better deals than other online drugstores. There isn’t anything you can’t order online anymore. Remedies like Deltasone ordinarily is used to treat diseases such as eye problems. Glucocorticoids naturally occurring steroids, which are easily absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract. There are varied drugs for every conditions. Cialis is a remedy prescribed to treat many illnesses. What do you already know about long term side effects of cialis? What consumers talk about how long does it take for cialis to take effect? A general sexual appeal among men is the erectile dysfunction. Sexual problems mostly signal deeper problems: low libido or erectile disfunction can be the symptom a strong health problem such as core trouble. Albeit the erectile dysfunction itself isn’t necessarily dangerous, erectile dysfunction is sometimes one of the early warning symptoms of other underlying health conditions that can be so dangerous. Unfortunately nearly all over-the-counter medicines have sometimes dangerous aftereffects, from muscle aches to death. If you buy any erectile dysfunction medicaments like Cialis, check with a physician that they are sure to take with your other drugs. Do not take unwanted medications. Take Cialis to your local chemist’s shop which will dispose of them for you.