Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Criminal Law Blogs -> StandDown Texas Project

Criminal Law

: StandDown Texas Project

Constitutional Rights Always Matter

By standdown

That's the title of Linda Campbell's latest column in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.  LINK  Despite his given name, Khristian Oliver was not heartened to learn that jurors in Nacogdoches consulted their Bibles in the room where they decided to sentence him to death.Several of them read Numbers 35:16-19, which says, "And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death."It might be easy to say that Oliver deserved Death Row for shooting Joe Collins in the course of a 1998 home robbery then smashing his head with a rifle butt while he lay in his front yard.Trouble is, what the Scripture-reading jurors did by bringing their Bibles into the deliberations violated the Constitution...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on April 09, 2009 (boomark / email).