Several readers have emailed to make sure we didn’t miss today’s return of the Chron Eye For The Death Row Killer Guy.
The Chron Eye is the newspaper’s recurring effort to portray death-row killers sympathetically. Here’s a quick refresher on the Chron Eye formula:
The usual formula is along the lines of pointing out some nice quality of the killer (for example, keeping poetry in prison), some bad quality of his childhood (perceived or real), and the problems at HPD and its crime lab (whether relevant or not to the killer being discussed).
Today’s Chron Eye arguably only hits one of the three, unless one wants to count the death row killer guy’s tattoos as a “nice quality” (and Chronicle writer Allan Turner does seem strangely enamored):
The blue prison tattoos on Alex Martinez’s arms and torso, as intense in imagery as anything on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, tell the story of his life. Somewhere, surely, are references to his wretched childhood, the endless beatings and psychological abuse.
But it’s the tombstones, macabre tributes to the women whose throats he slashed, that are most chilling.
“Maria,” reads one, referring to Maria Martinez, the stepmother who miraculously survived his brutal attack in August 2001. “To be continued.”
The second cuts to the heart of what brought the 28-year-old one-time Houston fast-food worker to death row. Beneath the inscription, “RIP,” are a date, a woman’s name and the sum, “$300.” Seemingly cryptic, the tattoo is a crude ink-and-skin memorial to South Houston prostitute Helen Joyce Oliveros, who, on Aug. 12, 2001, was murdered by Martinez during a squabble over her fee.
Nice guy. Note also the author’s assumptions in the lede of a wretched childhood that included abuse, something actually not established (and perhaps contradicted) in the story later:
Martinez’s adoptive mother, Velma Griffin, who raised the child from 15 months to nine years, when her marriage ended in divorce, denied all the abuse allegations. Today, she prays for him and hopes his life will be spared. She routinely attempts to visit him on death row, though on each occasion he has rebuffed her, silently returning to his cell when he determines the identity of his visitor.
“I feel very sad,” she said. “I cry all the way home. I have to sit in the car five to 10 minutes to compose myself. I just wanted him to know that somebody loves him.”
Griffin said Martinez’s early years showed promise — as a Boy Scout he was selected to address the Texas Senate. But after the divorce, when she gave up custody of her four children to her ex-husband, “his life just fell apart.”
Martinez said the situation hardly improved when his adoptive father remarried. His stepmother, he asserted, intensely disliked him and worked to alienate his father.
“She wouldn’t do anything,” he said. “She’d wait until my dad came home, and he’d hit me hard.”
Martinez’s father, stepmother and siblings could not be located for comment.
By the time Martinez dropped out of the ninth grade, he was a steady inhaler of spray paint fumes and similar substances. His adolescence and young adulthood were marked by continual violent skirmishes — only during three years was he free of the criminal-justice system, records show.
“I always looked at it like everybody owed me something,” Martinez said. “My mentality was not giving a damn. I couldn’t see myself in the world for some reason. I was mad all the time. … I always thought that I could go right someday. I always thought that things would work out for the best. And all the time I was getting further in the hole.”
It sounds like this Death Row Killer Guy seems to be acknowledging his own part in going astray. But that sort of acknowledgment just doesn’t fit the Chron Eye “childhood victim” formula, and is buried.
Although the HPD crime lab wasn’t involved in this story, there is the obligatory reference to the potential unfairness of it all:
Partly out of fear that he will kill again, partly out of dread of spending his life behind bars, Martinez said in a recent death row interview that he wants to die. To the consternation of his appeals attorney, Houston lawyer Pat McCann, the killer has insisted that all efforts to save his life be halted.
“I think Alexander’s life still has value,” he said. “I wish he would change his mind.”
McCann thinks a key element of the prosecution’s case — testimony by his client’s Harris County cellmate, Cesar Rios — is faulty.
“This is a case that never should have been a capital case to start with,” McCann said. “A lying jailhouse snitch was one of the key elements in making a murder case a capital case. … If Alexander dies, he’d be dying for a lie. That’s not justice.”
[snip]
Martinez, in the death row interview, affirmed that he likely would kill again.
It’s hard to get that worked up over it. One wonders why so much column space was wasted on this.
We thought Mr. Kathryn Kase‘s newspaper had abandoned the Chron Eye series, since it’s mainly been running AP coverage of death row killer guys about to meet their end lately. Although the series is kind of fun for us — sort of like Chris Baker’s “Debris Game” — we’d just as soon see it go away.
