VIGIL INFORMATION
8/28: Daroyce Mosley
8/29: John Amador
8/30: Kenneth Foster
Daroyce Mosley:
http://www.daroycemosley.com/daroyce.pdf
Full Texas Monthly article from 1996
From Texas Monthly…Nineteen-year-old Goat Hill resident DaRovce Mosley, a former honors student at Kilgore High School, member of the student council, and starter on the basketball team who had gone on to Kilgore College was accused of 4 murders in a Kilgore Bar, Katie’s.
…After an all-night interrogation, DaRoyce had signed a confession in which he admitted that he had agreed to accompany his 31-year-old uncle, Ray Don Mosley, on a robbery along with Marcus Smith, a 16yearold Goat Hill teenager with a juvenile record. DaRoyce said that although he had tried several times that night to back out of the robbery, his uncle Ray Don, one of the most feared criminals in the Goat Hill neighborhood, persuaded him to come inside the bar. “I had never done anything bad before, and I felt like doing something bad,” DaRoyce said in the confession. After they walked in, he said, Ray Don shot Sandra Cash. “The people looked at me and it scared me and I shot a lady at a table,” DaRoyce said. He then said Ray Don pointed a gun at him and ordered him to kill everyone else or be shot himself. For the police, the case was open and shut. But plenty of Kilgore’s citizens were convinced that the confession was not the truth. DaRovce’s friends insisted that he hated guns: When he had gone along with them on camping trips, he wouldn’t hold a gun, let alone shoot one.
A psychiatrist and a psychologist who arrived separately to interview DaRoyce said that nothing about his personality fit the profile of a mass murderer. It was also peculiar, they said, that DaRoyce had given -a series of different stories during his all-night interrogation before finally saying that he did the killings. “I believe that, during the night he confessed, he was under intense pressure, emotionally broken down, his mind almost dissociated from reality,” said Louis-Victor Jeantv, an Austin psychiatrist who spoke to DaRoyce for several hours. “He was trying to please a group of angry police officers because that is his nature.”
After his arrest. DaRoyce told his attorneys that he had been so scared during his interrogation that he had lied to the police. The real story, he said, was that in a moment of weakness, trying to prove to a belligerent Ray Don that he was not a “punk,” he went along on the robbery but ran out the door once Ray Don started shooting. To those who knew the strapping, insolent Ray Dononce described by a lawyer as “a walking piece of dynamite”-it was absurd that the police were apparently believing his confession, in which he said that he shot Sandra Cash but then threw down his gun once DaRoyce began shooting everyone else. Did the police really think that Ray Don Mosley, the man who organized the Katie’s robbery, deliberately dropped his gun? At least five Goat H ill residents later gave sworn statements that they personally heard Ray Don claim he had murdered everyone at Katie ‘s. (Ray Don would not be interview d for this article .) Charline Jackson, Ray Don’s sister and DaRoyce’s mother, said Ray Don came by h r house , told her he had committed the killings , and then adde d that he enjoyed looking at the blood coming out of the backs of the white people’s heads.
For a death penalty case, in w hich the truth is supposed to be obvious , there seemed to be as many questions as answers. Indeed the case sent the town into turmoil, forcing its citizens to confront the fine line between guilt and innocence and between justice and compassion. As one longtime teacher at the high school would later say, “After DaRoyce’s arrest, none of us here were ever the same again”…
John Amador:
Amador is to be executed on August 29 for the murder of 32 year old Reza Ayari, a cab driver from San Antonio. Amador has been on death row since 1995 and was 18 years old at the time of his offense. Amador claims ineffective assistance of counsel during his initial trial and appellate proceedings.
Kenneth Foster:
Foster was sentenced to death in 1997 for the murder of Michael LaHood under Texas’ controversial “law of parties.” This law abolishes the distinction between principal actor and accomplice in a crime and allows both to be held equally culpable.
In the early hours of August 15th, 1996, Mauriceo Brown, DeWayne Dillard, Julius Steen and Kenneth Foster stopped outside the house of Michael LaHood. Brown got out of the car, robbed LaHood, and then shot him. To convict Kenneth Foster of capital murder under the law of parties, the prosecution had to prove that there was a conspiracy between him and Brown to rob LaHood, and that Foster should have anticipated that murder might have occurred during the robbery. At the trial Brown testified that there had been no discussion of robbing LaHood before he got out of the car.
The Free Kenneth Foster campaign has been very successful in getting state, national, and international attention for this case, http://www.freekenneth.com/.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
Texas is the only state that applies the “law of parties” to capital cases, allowing accomplices who “should have anticipated” a murder to receive the death penalty. Kenneth Foster is scheduled to die Thursday under this provision. You can urge the governor to stop the execution.
Write the governor:Office of the GovernorP.O. Box 12428Austin, Texas 78711-2428
E-mail the governor through his Website:www.governor.state.tx.us/contact
Call the governor’s opinion hotline:1-800-252-9600
Thursday, August 30:3pm-7pm: Protest the execution of Kenneth Foster Jr outside the Ellis Unit in Huntsville, TX. Groups from all over the state will converge to stand against this injustice and demand until the very end that the State of Texas does the right thing by stopping this execution. If unable to go to Huntsville, vigils will be in place across the state, www.tcadp.org/vigils.php
Upcoming Events:
Music for Life Tour with Sara Hickman, First United Methodist Church – Austin, October 3 https://www.tcadp.org.musictour.php/
Texas Journey of Hope…From Violence to Healing, October 13 – 27, http://www.journeyofhope.org/
8th Annual March to Stop Executions – Houston, October 27