We thought perhaps the Chron Eye for the Death Row Killer Guy, the anti-death-penalty newspaper’s series of apologia for death-row killers, had been retired (much like the silly Editorial LiveJournals seem to have been retired).
There was the reverse Chron eye last week, to add to the suspicion.
There has been the recent tendency simply to run AP coverage of executions in Texas.
And there was this AP coverage of death row killer guy Robert Dale Rowell, posted to Chron.com yesterday.
That’s why we were surprised to see today’s Chron Eye by Rosanna Ruiz.
She sounds a little sad that she doesn’t have much to work with, as Chron Eyes go:
Unlike many of his fellow inmates on death row, Robert Dale Rowell never got much television airtime or received much newspaper ink.
The 50-year-old will walk into Texas’ death chamber tonight a virtual unknown, the 18th inmate to be put to death this year.
No public campaign has been waged on his behalf. The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty issued a routine alert on Rowell’s execution that does little more than lay out the facts of his case.
A last-minute reprieve is unlikely. His lawyers are not claiming he is mentally retarded or that his trial attorney fell asleep in court. His appeals were exhausted last month when the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to review his case or his claim that the trial judge should have given the jury better instructions.
“There is nothing now pending,” Rowell’s attorney Ed Mallett said Monday.
The trial was not even one to stand out for Kelly Siegler, the Harris County assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case in 1994.
So, this one was so cut-and-dried that even the usual suspects couldn’t get worked up about it.
But given her shot at writing a Chron Eye, Rosanna Ruiz gives it a strong effort:
Eleven years later, Mallett describes his client as a “reasonably literate, very nice person.”
“He has a history of being violent when confronted and under the influence of drugs. All of his offenses are drug-related,” Mallett said. “He’s aware he has an extreme susceptibility to addiction and that he cannot control it when it’s available to him.”
Rowell earned his GED and associate’s degree in prison.
In court records, Randy Rowell explained that he and his brother had to be more independent as children because their mother had been on medication most of her life. Randy Rowell did not return a phone call seeking comment for this article.
“The whole neighborhood did drugs and once you do them, you always want them,” Robert Rowell is quoted in a 1998 report after a psychological evaluation. “Before I did drugs, I stayed with my grandfather and fished and I was happy.”
See, he wasn’t so bad. Not for a guy with a bad mother. And he liked to fish! Life just sort of got away from him, and made him kill those people.
And that’s today’s Chron Eye.
