Patrick Timmons
My Ancestors’ Violence
The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836-1916 The First Waco Horror:The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP Clive Weldon Timmons, my paternal grandfather, was born on November 11, 1906 in … Read More
Frequent Injustice
by Patrick Timmons
Frequent Injustice BY PATRICK TIMMONS Executed on a Technicality: Lethal Injustice on America’s Death Row By David R. Dow Beacon Press 256 pages, $24.95 ohnny Joe Martinez did not walk to his execution on May 22, 2002. The prison guards … Read More
The Art of Capital Punishment
The Art of Capital Punishment BY PATRICK TIMMONS Premeditated: Meditations on Capital Punishment, Recent Works by Malaquias Montoya Dougherty Arts Center, Austin, January 5–30 Instituto Mexicano, San Antonio, February 17–28 ’ve always been against the death penalty,” says Malaquias Montoya. … Read More
Back to Jasper
In Jasper, on the night of June 6, 1998, Bill King, Shawn Berry, and Russell Brewer offered James Byrd Jr. a ride home. The next morning, according to the police report, “the body of a black male, minus the head … Read More
Las Americas
The Politics of Death
The death penalty always seems to provide fodder for the myths of the living. One of the more widely circulated myths is that Mexico is de jure abolitionist—that capital punishment does not exist. After all, President Vicente Fox has made … Read More
Chicago Boy
An interview with investigative journalist Greg Palast
I was covering Enron when the papers here were still treating Ken Lay like a cross between Jesus and Mother Teresa and Elvis Presley,” says Greg Palast, an award-winning investigative journalist for The Guardian newspaper, BBC’s prestigious Newsnight television program, … Read More
Dateline Texas
No PromiseLand for Me
The Love Won Out conference kicked off its multi-city national tour in Austin on a sunny morning in late February. A media advisory from the heavily promoted tour alerted me to the event. It was hosted by Focus on the … Read More
Interview with History
Robert Fisk Talks About Iraq, Afghanistan, and War
One of the United Kingdom’s most prominent foreign correspondents, Robert Fisk currently reports on the Middle East for The Independent (www.independent.co.uk). He has received numerous awards for his reporting, including the Amnesty International Overall Media Award (1998) for his work … Read More
Movie Review
Sins of the Father
On the eve of the Mexico City premier of El Crimen del Padre Amaro, a highly indignant priest named Julián Martínez bared his soul to the national press. “I’ve told people thousands of times not to go see it,” he … Read More