Texas capital murder exoneree Christopher Scott (pictured) has urged Dallas County’s new District Attorney, Faith Johnson, to drop the death penalty from murder charges pending against Erbie Bowser. Bowser, who is black, is a seriously mentally ill Marine veteran who was discharged from military service after having been diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He faces four capital charges in the killings of his girlfriend, his estranged wife, and their daughters. When police found him, he was reportedly reciting his name, rank, and serial number, and the medical staff at the hospital to which he was taken him described him as delusional. In a guest column for the Dallas News, Scott—who served 12 years of a life sentence for a murder he did not commit—writes that the Dallas DA’s office “has failed the African-American community for generations,” and says that “[t]he Bowser case offers an opportunity for Johnson to change the way her office has historically treated African Americans accused of committing capital crimes.” He notes that in 2013, the Dallas District Attorney’s office “agreed not to seek the death penalty in a nearly identical case involving a white defendant, William Palmer[, who had] stabbed his wife and both her parents to death while his wife’s sister and her six-year-old hid in a closet.” Dallas has long been criticized for its history of racial bias in enforcing its criminal laws, including bias in jury selection and the application of the death penalty. During the 30-year administration of Henry Wade, the office produced a training manual instructing prosecutors to exclude people of color from juries, and in a death penalty decision in 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court found that black people in Dallas County had been “almost categorically … excluded from jury service.” The racially disproportionate use of the death penalty has continued in subsequent prosecutorial administrations. A report from the Fair Punishment Project identified Dallas is one of only 16 U.S. counties that imposed five or more death sentences between 2010 and 2015; seven of the eight people sentenced to death in that period were black. Johnson, whom Wade hired in 1982, is the first African-American woman to serve as District Attorney and Bowser’s case is considered a barometer of the path she will follow in capital prosecutions. In addition to the issue of racial fairness, Bowser’s case presents serious questions about the appropriateness of the death penalty for defendants with severe mental illness, and in particular, veterans with PTSD. Bowser has a history of hallucinations and psychosis stretching back to his adolescence, and reportedly was on more than a dozen medications, including sedatives and antipsychotics, at the time of his arrest. So far this year, seven states have proposed legislation to exempt people with serious mental illness, including PTSD, from the death penalty. [UPDATE: The Dallas District Attorney sought the death penalty against Mr. Bowser, but in May 2017, after a capital murder trial that lasted nearly three weeks, jurors divided on the appropriate sentence and Bowser was sentenced to life without parole.]
(C. Scott, “Dallas DA should drop the death penalty against black man,” Dallas News, February 24, 2017; J. Pishko, “Is Capital Punishment Making a Comeback in Dallas?,” Slate, February 28, 2017.) See Race and Mental Illness.
