By Paul Duggan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 20, 1998; Page A22

Like many death row inmates in the final days of their lives, James Ronald Meanes was resigned to his fate. With his legal appeals virtually exhausted, he chose not to seek a last-ditch temporary reprieve. It might well have been granted, but he knew it would only postpone the inevitable.

And so at 6:02 p.m. Tuesday, 17 years after his crime, Meanes was strapped to the lethal-injection gurney here and 26 minutes later was pronounced dead.

Joseph Stanley Faulder, by contrast, fought hard to avoid his date with the needle. Over the years he had raised a host of appeals issues, including an alleged treaty violation by Texas police. As a Canadian citizen, Faulder argued, he should have been told after his arrest that he had a right to seek legal help from the Canadian government.

Fifteen minutes before he was to die on Dec. 10, a prison official delivered news that the U.S. Supreme Court had stayed his execution.

"Far out," Faulder replied. "That suits me."

Meanes, who was 42, is in his grave, while Faulder, 61, will live to see Christmas, his 21st on Texas's crowded death row. What happened in their cases, and in the cases of four other men who had December execution dates here, illustrates the complexities and vagaries of capital punishment in America two decades after the Supreme Court allowed executions to resume.

The six convicted murderers were set to die over a 12-day period beginning Dec. 3. That was a record schedule in so short a span – even for Texas, which carries out executions far more frequently than any of the 37 other states that allow the death penalty.

When the legal dust finally settled, however, three of the men were dead, and three were not. And each case offered a lesson in the workings of what then-Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun in 1994 termed "the machinery of death."

Andrew Cantu, without an attorney to help him, had been handling his own appeals and was failing miserably until – purely by chance – a veteran death penalty lawyer learned of his case. She worked furiously for days and nights and managed to halt his execution minutes before he was to walk to the death chamber on Dec. 3.

Attorneys for Danny Lee Barber, on the day he was to die, filed a hastily prepared lawsuit accusing Texas's pardons board of violating his right to due process of law. A judge said he could not determine whether the complaint was valid because board members review clemency requests in private and do not explain their votes publicly. With less than a hour to spare on Dec. 9, he ordered Barber to be kept alive pending a court hearing this week on the board's procedures.

As the end neared for Daniel Lee Corwin, 40, he might have bought time by raising the same argument as Barber. But his lawyer thought it would be futile. It is the sort of litigation that death penalty proponents point to when they complain about delaying tactics. Even if the board is forced to change the way it operates administratively, its practice of routinely denying clemency almost certainly will continue.

On Dec. 7, Corwin ate a last supper of steak, potatoes and peas, then went to his death.

The next night, Jeff Emery, 39, got the needle. His lawyer, Tom Moran, saw no point in challenging the pardons board. In Texas and other states, death sentence commutations are so rare that capital punishment opponents scoff at the process, calling it one more failed element of an unworkable death penalty system. The clemency litigation is "not going to save any of these guys," Moran said.

America's death chambers, more active in recent years than they have been since the 1950s, are shut down for the holidays. This year's 68th and final execution – the 500th since the restoration of capital punishment – took place Friday in South Carolina, where Andrew Smith, 38, was put to death for fatally stabbing his landlords, a husband and wife in their eighties.

Come the new year, Cantu, Faulder and Barber may join Meanes, Corwin and Emery in the great beyond. Or they may continue languishing on death row in the Ellis Unit state prison here, 75 miles north of Houston. For the nation's 3,500-plus condemned prisoners, 450 of them in Texas, the tortuous route to execution is seldom predictable.

Andrew Cantu, 31, knows that.

He was convicted in the 1990 stabbing deaths of three members of an Abilene family, all in their sixties, in a murder-for-hire plot involving insurance money. His appeals began immediately, following a pattern similar in every state with a death penalty statute.

First came the "direct appeal," in which an inmate challenges his conviction before his state's highest court. For Cantu, it was the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. At this early stage, the appeal was limited to issues that had come up in the trial, such as evidentiary rulings. As happens in most cases, the Texas court affirmed Cantu's conviction, and the Supreme Court declined to review the ruling.

The next stage, the "state habeas corpus" stage, again puts the inmate in front of his state's highest court, this time raising issues that had not come up in the trial, such as newly discovered evidence or charges of prosecutorial misconduct. If the state court turns him away, the prisoner looks again to the Supreme Court, asking for a review but usually not getting it.

Next is the "federal habeas corpus" stage, beginning in the local U.S. District Court, where the prisoner's attorney reargues all the issues raised in the direct appeal and in the state habeas proceedings. If the federal judge rejects the arguments, the inmate turns to the nearest U.S Court of Appeals. And if he gets no relief there, he files another petition with the Supreme Court, asking yet again to be heard.

So it is no mystery why death row prisoners nationwide spend an average of nine years, three months behind bars before being executed. The average in Texas is slightly less, but as in every death penalty state, durations here vary widely from case to case. As Cantu sat in a small holding cell just after nightfall on Dec. 3, waiting to be ushered to the lethal-injection gurney, he had been a death row inmate for 7 1/2 years.

His relatively speedy almost-execution resulted from what death penalty opponents consider one of the most troubling aspects of capital punishment: the shortage of skilled lawyers willing to take on the exceedingly time-consuming and unprofitable cases of condemned inmates.

After Cantu's direct appeal failed, a Texas court appointed another attorney to handle his state habeas appeal, according to Mandy Welch, the lawyer who recently halted Cantu's scheduled execution. But the court-appointed lawyer, citing a conflict of interest, quit the case before filing Cantu's state habeas petition.

The court appointed another attorney for him. According to Welch, that lawyer met once with Cantu on death row. Months later, she said, "Mr. Cantu got a notice from the Court of Criminal Appeals that that lawyer had also asked to withdraw." By then it was late winter 1997.

Month earlier, Congress had passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. To speed executions, it set a strict limit on how long death row inmates could wait before starting their federal habeas appeals. But Cantu had not even begun his state habeas appeal.

The court appointed yet another attorney for him. "He didn't hear from that lawyer at all," said Welch. In the summer of 1997, Cantu filed a motion asking for the lawyer to be removed from the case. At a hearing on the request, according to Welch, the lawyer told the court that he had been too busy to meet with Cantu. He said he was unaware of the 1996 death penalty act or the time limit for federal habeas appeals.

Cantu said he would rather represent himself than place his fate in the hands of an uninterested lawyer. The court said fine.

Acting as his own attorney, Cantu became lost in a thicket of rules beyond his understanding. Forgoing his state habeas appeal, he sought to file a federal habeas petition, but a U.S. District Court judge turned him away last month, telling him the deadline for his appeal had passed.

A court worker, following an old routine, faxed a copy of the denial order to a number that had once belonged an anti-death penalty organization, a group long since disbanded. The fax wound up in the hands of a lawyer who had been a member of the organization.

She passed it on to Welch, who practices in Houston. She then rushed to Cantu's aid, arguing that he should be allowed to pursue a federal appeal. A judge ordered his execution delayed until the matter is decided.

"It was just a fluke, a complete accident," Welch said of the fax. Had it not been sent, Cantu might be dead now – like Corwin, a convicted serial killer; like Emery, who sexually assaulted and fatally stabbed a female college student during a 1979 burglary; and like Meanes, who shot and killed an armored car guard in 1981 during a holdup.

Instead, in his cell, Cantu waits.