Black Man Executed by Texas for Killing White Victim: White Appellant Judges Grant White Prosecutor's Request to Lift Stay of Execution
Thursday, October 11, 2012 at 12:00AM 
Supreme Court Refuses to Block Execution From [HERE] A Black man whose lawyers argued was mentally ill and incompetent for execution was put to death Wednesday evening for killing a 12-year-old white girl more than a decade ago.
Jonathan Green, 44, received lethal injection after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected last-day appeals to spare him. A judge earlier this week stopped the punishment, but an appeals court overturned the reprieve. Then 11th-hour appeals delayed the punishment nearly five hours past the initial 6 p.m. execution time and as the midnight expiration of the death warrant neared. Asked by the warden, who is white, if he had a statement from the death chamber gurney, Green shook his head and replied, "No." But seconds later he changed his mind, saying: "I'm an innocent man. I never killed anyone. Y'all are killing an innocent man."
He then looked down and said his left arm, where one of the needles carrying the lethal drug was inserted, and said, "It's hurting me bad." But almost immediately he began snoring loudly. The sounds stopped after about six breaths. Green was pronounced dead 18 minutes later at 10:45 p.m. It appeared the Supreme Court cleared the way for his execution earlier Wednesday when it rejected an appeal from his attorneys just as the window for the lethal injection opened at 6 p.m. However, the punishment was delayed Wednesday night by another appeal that finally was refused less than two hours before the midnight expiration of the death warrant neared.
White Victim Means Death for Black Man
Green was condemned for the abduction, rape and strangling of Christina Neal, whose body was found at his home in 2000 about a month after she was reported missing. Her family lived across a highway from Green in Dobbin, about 45 miles northwest of Houston. She was white. Since 1977, the overwhelming majority of death row defendants (77%) have been executed for killing white victims, even though African-Americans make up about half of all homicide victims. [MORE]
Christina's parents were among people to watch Green die. They declined to speak with reporters following the execution. These white folks got their revenge on.
Green suffers from schizophrenia, and his attorney, James Rytting, claims he also is borderline mentally retarded. He argued his hallucinations made him ineligible for the death penalty and said a state competency hearing for him two years ago was unfair. He said his client hallucinated about the "ongoing spiritual warfare between two sets of voices representing good and evil." That led to a reprieve from a federal district Judge Nancy Alas on Monday, who ruled that a state judge had violated due process in 2010 by finding Green mentally competent for the death penalty.
But the Texas attorney general's office appealed the decision and persuaded the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn that ruling and lift the stay of execution late Tuesday.
Circuit Ct of Appeals Granted White Prosecutor's Appeal of Decision to Stay his Excecution to Argue Competency. Asking the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn Atlas' ruling, Assistant Attorney General Tomee Heining (in photo) argued Tuesday that Green's appeal violated federal precedent by bringing up evidence not presented at trial and that the lower court abused its authority in its decision.
"Green's competency has been thoroughly explored in state court, and does not require further investigation," Heining said. "Green was given the opportunity to present, through appointed counsel, expert testimony, evidence and argument on the issue of his competency to be executed."
James Rytting, one of Green's attorneys, said the state's argument contained "misstatements and mischaracterizations" and urged the 5th Circuit uphold the reprieve.
"Vacating the stay will deny Mr. Green's right to develop his competency claim in federal proceedings," he said.
Rytting said the constitutional issue was whether Green now was incompetent for execution. [MORE]
Reader Comments (3)
In June 2000, Victor Neal, who was separated from his wife Laura, lived in the small community of Dobbin with his three daughters:
sixteen-year-old Victoria,
fifteen-year-old Jennifer, and
twelve-year-old Christina, the victim.
The next morning, Victor saw Jennifer and Victoria sleeping on the couch. He also noticed that the door to the girls' bedroom was closed. Assuming Christina was asleep in the bedroom, Victor left for work. When he got home about 3:00 or 4:00 p.m., Jennifer and Victoria told him that Christina had never returned home the night before. Victor asked the girls to go to Maria's house and tell Christina to come home. They found that Christina was not at Maria's house.
After learning about the argument between Christina and Victoria the night before, Victor concluded that Christina had spent the night at another friend's house, and the family began searching the neighborhood. Along the road near the Neal home, Victoria and Maria found Christina's glasses. The glasses were "smashed and broken," but Victoria testified that Christina had a habit of destroying her glasses when she got mad. Victor stopped looking for Christina around 11:00 or 11:30 p.m.
The next morning, Victor asked his sister, Tereza Goodwin, to look for Christina while he was at work. Christina had run away before, so Victor told Tereza to report her as a runaway if she could not find her. Later that day, having failed to locate Christina, Tereza reported her missing to a Montgomery County Sheriff's deputy. Local law-enforcement officers then joined the family in searching for Christina.
On June 26, the FBI joined the search. On that same day, Jennifer and her mother found what appeared to be Christina's panties at the edge of the woods across from the Neal home. Also around this time, Victoria found Christina's bracelet and necklace along a pathway in the woods. The search continued.
On June 28, investigators spoke with Jonathan Marcus Green, who lived in Dobbin. He said he had no information concerning Christina's disappearance, and that he was either at home or at his neighbor's house on the night she disappeared. He gave the investigators permission to search his home and property, with the condition that he be present. Investigators performed a cursory search of the house and property, but they noticed nothing significant.
A few days later, investigators again asked Green his whereabouts on the night of Christina's disappearance. Again, Green claimed to have been at home or at his neighbor's house.
On July 19, Manuel Jimenez, who lived on the property behind Green's, told investigators that Green had an unusually large fire in his burn pile the day after Christina disappeared. A few days later, investigators went to Green's home and asked if they could search his property again, including his burn pile. Green again consented, but insisted that he be present during the search.
FBI agents Sue Hillard and Mark Young walked around the burn pile with Green. Young pushed a metal probe into the ground to vent the soil and check for any disturbances. When the probe sank three feet into the ground at one location, Young determined that the ground had been disturbed or dug up in that area; he concluded that the disturbed section covered a very large area. He also smelled a distinct odor emanating from the disturbed section of ground which he identified as "some sort of decaying body." The investigation team then began to dig up the disturbed area. Green, who had been cooperative up to that point, became angry and told the officers to get off his property.
The investigative team returned to Green's property later that night with a search warrant. They discovered that part of the burn pile had been excavated, leaving what appeared to be a shallow grave. They also smelled the "extremely foul, fetid odor" of a "dead body in a decaying state." When investigators asked Green what had happened at the burn pile, Green said that he had dug the pit to show authorities that "there was no dead body in there."
An officer then arrived with a "cadaver dog," trained to detect human remains. As the dog was walking to the burn pile, it alerted to the house. Upon entering the house, the dog repeatedly went to the side of a recliner that was wedged into a corner of the room. Agent Hillard looked behind the recliner and saw "a foot sticking out of the top of [a blue] bag" and what appeared to be human remains. Before the discovery was announced, Green was overheard to say, "Those Mexicans are setting me up" and "put a body in my house."
The remains were identified as Christina's. The medical examiner, Dr. Joye Carter, concluded from a ligature mark around Christina's neck that Christina was strangled. She also determined that Christina's arms had been tied behind her back and that Christina had been sexually assaulted before she died. She testified that the body had been wrapped in a blanket and placed inside a blue bag.
During the course of the autopsy, various materials were recovered from Christina's body. Two black hairs that did not appear to be Christina's were found in her pubic area. Based on the way Christina was positioned within the blanket, Carter determined that the hairs must have been present before her body was wrapped in the blanket, and could not have been transferred there afterward. Mitochondrial-DNA testing excluded 99.7% of the African-American population as a source of the hair. Green, an African-American, could not be excluded from the remaining 0.3%.
Carter also recovered a black cotton cloth from Christina's mouth. The cloth was positioned in such a way that Carter determined, to a medical certainty, that the cloth did not cause Christina's death.
Criminalist Bradley Mullins from the Texas Department of Public Safety crime lab testified that many of the fibers recovered from Christina's body matched fiber samples seized from Green's property and residence. On the panties that were recovered near the Neal home five days after Christina had disappeared and nearly a month before her body was found, Mullins found a fiber that had characteristics identical to carpet in Green's residence.
The damning evidence is the discovery of the body on his property: burned, buried, and relocated. The evidence of medical examiner Joye Carter and the fiber analysis of Bradley Mullins is worthless. The fiber analysis is worthless simply because most fiber analysis is speculative. Any testimony from Joy Carter is worthless because she demonstrated in the case of Larry Swearingen that she acted as a pawn of the state.
The argument over whether or not Jonathan Green should be executed has hinged around his mental capacity or incapacity.
It's about whether you killed someone or not. Who cares if you're purple skinned and you kill someone who's green skinned. Who cares if your black and you kill someone who's white. Who cares if you're white and you kill someone who's black.
All that matters is that you killed someone.
Case closed.
This sack of crap killed a 12 year old girl. They have DNA evidence confirming it. So why not buck up and accept the facts as they are, instead of playing the race card.
Do you really think a bunch of "whiteys" are running around trying to wrongly convict black folks? Get real. And grow up. And let the race card go.
Oh yeah... I forgot... because playing the race card is easier than accepting responsibility.