welcome ponder this is our season we can repeat. to you on fox besides the stories in jeopardy just days ahead of the ceasefire deadline opposition rebels have refused their regimes demands guarantees for them physical signs and streets and. about twenty presidential hopefuls have now turned out to make a difference with a race to take up the state level hosni mubarak was ousted out about aig ever got was probably the most common political group skilled at conflict just by previous

pledges not to do so triggering fears of pushing to intrude on a strict islamic. mosque mosque who calls the case of victim of these politically motivated and violence to bring damage to russian arms dealer. if you are supposed to sentence the business not to twenty five is the conspiring to kill americans and the. next hour special reports the thomas miller l a fad telling a story of one man whose death penalty was overturned off his life and. the unofficial motto here is that we don't joke around in texas. if this is so original continue with as you seem to do just in the. rules for work it's got to be the joke so material that we soon can be useful for the person we thought the day this will be executed in the midst of the system work for the

written treaty. all of these inmates know that death row is an impossible place to escape from. throughout the years thomas miller's hopes of his case being revisited have faded away as seasons past he has seen many of his companions depart for the execution room little to hold on to jury in his way it's just letters and a few visits by close friends or family who have also had to prepare for the execution so i hope it won't happen again but he has me i'll go have your ready been confronted to an executor know that my friends who have been executed on the ways want to protect people they love from the trauma of looking at them and i. know. a few lawyers have tried to attack the texan system. jim marcus is one of them are and he made a one of a cane discovery. in his office of the law faculty of austin thomas miller

case takes up a lot of space in the bench. jim marcus entered this case almost by chance in one thousand nine hundred four back then he was working for an organization of volunteer lawyers defending inmates with no means of their own wrote one year or five by the time it was over the file itself filled to. that it was a huge file. because over the over time we just collected a lot of evidence mostly documenting the racism and scouting. for months jim marcus studied all the files from the one nine hundred eighty six case and stumbled upon something. that dallas county had a manual that instructed prosecutors to discriminate against potential jurors on the basis of race religion gender. you are wearing

what jim marcus discovered was staggering a discrimination handbook written at the end of the sixties and used by judges to systematically exclude black members of the jury. basically it's based on stereotypes it's based on prejudices it says that. you know people who are from any minority group are going to empathize with the accused expressed as a general distrust of women. and pretty clearly you know it says don't take jewish women not only jews but also flat people those who don't wear ties were considered an empty conformists and were said to make bad jurors. they're looking for right hunters. to be the jurors. it is clearly stated that white hunters are always good jurors for the state these prosecutors and thomas' case.

they were not following us but if you look at their notes it'll say black male no time auntie for no tie to his beard no tie no ties wearing jeans. so you can see that what the what the notes show is that they were exactly this. the initials b m r for a black male he's a black man and has a beard that's one who is left out. l f is for latino female here is a hispanic lady who did not make it through selection. these are a few of many handwritten annotations corresponding to potential jury members presenting themselves to the court for the defendants. to recount but the trial. was in truth it was going to. be

a process. the bigotry. discrimination that was coming going on with the system. at thomas miller's trial ten out of the eleven black jurors were left out we met one of them. belief eales agreed to meet us at an airport lobby. twenty two years after the miller trial she seems almost surprised by our questions to live in a society that is full of discrimination you have to have a thick skin therefore things bother me that way you know i don't take it personally it's just institutional have you been asked to be a good juror dear oh yes but go up to the courts own as they call it a panel is. always rejected so you know this continuous.

savage face this is we can sure say oh i guess i don't know but the thing is that yes i have been called to jury duty many times since then and i've never been selected to be part of a jury either my name is carol and i only testimonies of the ignored jurors overlapped. leukemia ten years ago by some young lawyers confirms this reassure sherry her father was a victim of a truncated trial so. i would ask him. how did they feel and what were they feeling at the town when they could not. sit on the jury because they were black and that was they are wrong. because. the evidence.

i think even when i barry says will still be calling for. similar to what happened in the miller case more than ninety percent of black jurors have been left out from trials over the past forty years in dallas texas. this is the whole were led by this man judge bill hill. can one explain that such ways were left on punished. perhaps because the death penalty is a source of contention in the u.s. . we have officials here who are right wing politicians who do not value human life and who use the death penalty to promote their political careers and promote their or their life and their lifestyle and all our politicians or elected course our governor our state representatives our senators. our judges criminal court judges our district attorneys they're all

a lot and they like this they think it's good to be appear to be cuffed on crime and the toughest on crime they think they can be used to have the death penalty and the support of death. is the death penalty used as a means to profit bill hill now retired did not wish to comment on this. we really focused on two issues both having to do with the fairness of his trial one was the racism the other one was that you know thomas was shot by the police when he was arrested with a with a round of ammunition that explodes on impact so a bullet entered his abdomen and then exploded and shredded you know parts of his organs and surface. and he was an intensive care for a long time they basically moved him from the hospital of the jail and tried him and at the time of his trial he had lost you know fifty pounds he was you know out

of it he was on medication he was not competent to be tried. very poor health and incapable of attending a trial this confirms a document that we got ahold of. famous dr ari kiya wrote the following. mr thomas miller was not able to defend himself even if he could be present at the audience. any man presenting such to pression pain and wounds wouldn't be able to endure such stressful event even more so if the trial was a life or death decision. in two thousand and one thomas miller had been on death row for already fourteen years when his lawyer jim marcus finished his counter investigation which detailed the discrimination and irregular. artes of the trial. the file was sent to the appeals court of texas.

and though we had so much evidence there is no way that we can. and then we look. for late february or into first two thousand and two. you know it was a sense of relief you know because like all our bureaus was it exhausted we have a very reference sample supreme court and you know live in order for words like. this is like you know. in the beginning of two thousand and two this was the last chance the u.s. supreme court in washington is the highest in the land it is the only one capable of revoking a state's made decision each year the supreme court's receives around one thousand man's from death row inmates and only two or three are accepted for thomas miller's

defense the true race against death started i was about it was less than a week before the execution and the supreme court. announced that it would hear the case that was a huge relief. convinced that there was discrimination during the trial the supreme court demanded that the death row sentence be reexamined but the texan court did not see eye to eye with this decision and refused to admit the miller had been a victim of racist practice he was to be executed. takes in just as supported by a strong conservative public opinion and by very active victim associations refuses all the examination of the case. i believe as we practice criminal justice in texas we do a better job of it than any other state in america. one we execute our convicted capital murder we have the highest execution rate in america we're not afraid to do

it we do it well we tolerate a lot in texas you can be anything you want in this state but be prepared to pay the consequences of your actions. and i think. that the rest of the country should take note of all of that so in that respect i believe texas is the most progressive state in america. how can such confidence be understood when suspicions of judiciary errors increased in texas. and universities and for those who defend human rights the miller case has become a symbol. culprit is one of the main leaders of the abolitionist movement and teaches history at dulles university. where he is not surprised by the ruthlessness of the texan authorities.

and why do you think they want to kill the minorities so badly because the state is a hateful racist state that wants to kill poor and poor people and people of color this is a hate state this is the region the south is still hateful the american criminal justice system is discriminatory this is a normal part of the american criminal justice system and this state is among the worst of the worst the high profile nature of his case. which has embarrassed correct fully this state on multiple occasions to show the how wrong and terrible the state was in its prosecution of him the state will do all that it can it will make the extra effort to prove that the end result would be ok we couldn't kill him but we'll make sure he never gets out to think it would he would die in jail i don't think thomas miller ill is ever going to see the light of day

as a free man i hope that he would confronted with texan stubbornness and refusal to recognize any mistake in the miller case the supreme court just. cited in june two thousand and five to reverse the decision in its report. denounced the selection of the jurors by race and concluded that there is no doubt that the use of the ample can texas allows judges to discriminate. with six votes against three judges of the supreme court ordered a new trial. so that teacher cases during the sixty's seventy's and eighty's this the miller case goes all over the media more than ever before had the state of texas been asked to revoke the death sentence once. i went in with the matter. and when i went i actually went down there because the world we live in

told me that he had something to tell me so i went to visit and i said down he come out was it always molly and he tell me that his case had been heard at the supreme court and that they made a decision that they're going to retry his case and they want to actually hear it the supreme court and at that point it was like my heart had stopped where ok he has an opportunity to actually get off of death row. but texan justice hadn't said its last words the spread of execution returns. raised by the supreme court decision dallas county general attorney bill hill struck back. he refused to deny miller's guilt and warns that we will request the death penalty at the new trial.

police want to risk the body and convict and prosecutors want to win for some reason the truth goes out the window nobody gives a damn about the truth they want to win. defense attorneys prosecutors they want to win. in order to win as the year two thousand and seven came to an end justice proposed a deal to thomas miller attorneys were fair to it as an agreement but miller's friends and family saw it as a trap even the trial would take place again and he might end up sentenced to death or he could plead guilty and the sentence would be changed to life imprisonment in order not to die thomas miller had to accept to stop claiming d n a since which he had been defending for twenty years for his friends the choice was clear better to plead guilty then to be sentenced to death again thomas miller still wants to defend his innocence but richard the detective found the words to tear him from it

if you want to represent yourself i told you that i would stay with. help you and i will do that but. be sure that there's only one thing that's going to happen . you're going to go to trial you're going to be found guilty and you going to be sentenced to give. that's going to. you're going to die but you're going to save his life thomas miller finally decided to give up defending his innocence despite all the unanswered questions despite all the efforts that were made to counter investigate and despite the real doubt about whether or not he is guilty thomas miller signed. on march nineteenth two thousand and eight he signed this document in which he pleads guilty and sees. his sentence changed to life imprisonment. you left death row forever and was transferred to this detention center where we met him nineteen years after our first encounter.

with good scientists. we. then told us his team's attorneys that hope was for about two weeks off in a different sort of that we had from people turning everything right. people are really having a sincere love and appreciation for us as a human being. and they always want most. to not go back from ok when did you realize that this thread is. that. when they said that we had a license. to jersey or do real life sims. we shook our hands it was good luck. the rest of life.

a dead port is something we begin to. is just precious it begins to rise for us mentally and psychologically almost like physically that we carry around. in it was almost like a medium term roads we come with really really in terms of person just began to just disappear off gradually you know i believe in death from was. but at the same time you know. because this was. for thomas miller and for all the inmates discriminated over the past few decades in texas hoekstra the face of one man. craig watkins is the new attorney general of dallas county he follows the much feared bill hill and he is the first

black man to take on this job in texas. the trial which he witnessed on september nineteenth two thousand and eight was a landmark one man walking forward of between all his lawyers had spent twenty five years in prison for rape which he had always tonight finally authorized by the attorney general d.n.a. tests proved his innocence and the judge then had to decide if he were to be freed or no it's. very. very hard. the pressure said. just. for.

fun or good. theories. for. mason thank you only three people thank you for any general watkins personally congratulated johnny lindsay and wished him good luck he also told him how to term and he is to continue to fight against wrongful accusations. that. johnny lindsay is the. one thousand from men to be freed in only a few months and more than three hundred files have yet to be examined. still with kids case secret considering it's a great day for us and one no it's not for me up it's a great day for the common justice system. and i hope that we can take care of this issue for i think it's easier to be on the fricken american to do this work well in

our office it's been easier. but from what you are coming from i i don't have a choice i have to do this without saving many innocents in prison obviously yes well you know that clearly has still were how they exclude certain individuals from the jury because of their race. in texas some years ago. and early ninety's mid ninety's we decided to change how we. might actually have pictured on juries but i think i want a long way to make sure that our juries approach zero but we need to go even further because prosecutors versus culture and this is just a small moment in time and so that at the end of the day people will understand and hopefully when i'm gone. it will ever become just a legal system that asks for forgiveness and gives freedom back to those who were

wrongfully accused such as the image that's sure reka holds on to she dreams of freedom for her father. since his sentence has been changed to life imprisonment she can visit him every week she does not shy away from her one goal to get my dad . that's it what it's like maybe. there's no stopping point. there's no stop with wanted. to be truthful based upon the law was in the state of texas people draw from i don't normally get out of prison you know your home is from the rest that right from prison ok. so if we get out you know it would be a blessing that we'd like to be sure that. a person who come from what you call the

nose of locals you know you know and or actually some of the come from that you can actually make a positive contribution to humanity so we're hoping that that we're close people stop and look maybe execution is not the answer maybe something else that we could do besides kill people in order to prove that kind of people as well you know him to some degree or another we're just hoping that we can be positive estimate how life can be some of example for humanity in general you know. really you know. everything that. you think a seven year goes the girls of because for you right for us to occur yes i think michael thomas miller was thirty four when he was sentenced he is now sixty one but

he's. in theory it is possible to imagine a conditional release for good behavior and after more than twenty years spent in jail. in reality is fate is still in the hands of the texan judiciary system.

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