Can the execution of a Jewish prisoner in Texas be stopped? Supporters are praying for a miracle
Attorney Alan Dershowitz, left, is helping with a campaign to avert the scheduled execution of Jedidiah Murphy, a Jewish prisoner on death row in Texas. Photo by Getty (Dershowitz); L’chaim (Murphy).
By Beth Harpaz September 27, 2023
Attorney Alan Dershowitz has joined a last-ditch effort to avert the execution of a Jewish man on death row in Texas.
Jedidiah Murphy, 48, is scheduled to die by lethal injection Oct. 10. The date coincides with World Against the Death Penalty Day, a day of advocacy by death-penalty opponents.
Murphy murdered 79-year-old Bertie Cunningham on Oct. 4, 2000, in Garland, Texas. He was high on cocaine when he shot her, stole her car and bought alcohol and cigarettes with her credit cards. He has been on death row in Livingston, Texas, since 2001.
Activists acknowledge that the chances of averting his execution are slim. “It would be a miracle,” said Abraham Bonowitz, co-founder of the organization L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty, which has been organizing support for Murphy.
In an email sent to the Forward from prison, Murphy wrote: “I have two weeks left before the state tries to kill me.”
The case against execution
Dershowitz, an expert on constitutional law and former Harvard law professor, has advised on defense cases for many controversial high-profile clients, including O.J. Simpson and former President Donald Trump. He said he’s trying to personally reach Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to lay out what he sees as compelling legal arguments for commuting Murphy’s sentence.
Dershowitz said he’s been opposed to the death penalty since he was 15. “But even if you believe in the death penalty, this is not the proper case for it,” he said in a phone interview. “There are thousands of murders and homicides committed every year, many of them in Texas, and only a tiny number get the death penalty. The death penalty should be reserved for the most heinous repeat offenders. This case doesn’t fit that criteria.”
But he agreed with Bonowitz that the battle to save Murphy is “all very uphill.” He was only recently brought into the case and said he even spent part of Yom Kippur working on it: “I went to shul, I fasted, but the saving of human life — pikuach nefesh — is more important than davening.”
Dershowitz said several legal issues justify commuting Murphy’s sentence to life in prison. Among them: Prosecutors suggested at his trial, without evidence, that he had committed a prior carjacking. But he was never charged in that case, and the evidence is “overwhelming” that he had nothing to do with it, Dershowitz said.
In addition, Dershowitz said, jurors were instructed to impose the death penalty if they believed beyond a reasonable doubt Murphy was likely to commit more violent acts. “Twenty years have passed and he hasn’t been violent, so the current evidence undercuts the false prediction made by the jury,” Dershowitz said. “The instructions to the jury were deeply flawed.”
Finally, Dershowitz said, “this is a man with a long history prior to his crime of serious mental illness. The court did not pay sufficient attention to his history of mental illness, hospitalization and psychosis.”
Childhood trauma
Murphy has been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, a condition brought on by childhood abuse and trauma. It is characterized by changes in behavior and memory gaps. He has said he has no memory of murdering his victim.
Murphy lived with his grandparents in Texas until he was 5, according to an account he wrote for a website created by L’chaim. His alcoholic father nearly beat his mother to death, and after his grandmother died, he was sent to an orphanage and then adopted by a family that abused him.
He was removed from that family after several years and placed in foster care, then adopted by another family. He began drinking at age 13 to self-medicate and was living on his own by age 16. His original name was Jim Kines; the name Jedidiah Murphy was given to him by a foster family.
A Jewish response
In response to outreach by L’chaim, several synagogues and Jewish organizations put appeals for Murphy’s case in their High Holiday messages and have organized letter-writing campaigns on his behalf. They include the Or Hamidbar congregation in Palm Springs, California; Makom Shelanu, a Jewish community in Fort Worth, Texas, and Matir Asurim, which describes itself as “the Jewish care network for incarcerated people.”
“We’ve been asking rabbis and communities and Sunday school classes to get out a piece of paper and a stamp and put letters in the mail to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and to Gov. Abbott to ask for mercy for Jedidiah,” Bonowitz said. L’chaim also has an online petition for Murphy.
Campaigns to avert executions are often based on a claim of innocence. Although that’s not the situation here, there’s “a really strong case to be made for Jedidiah,” Bonowitz said. “He is remorseful, he has changed as an individual and he can be a productive member of the prison community. Nobody is advocating that he be freed and he is not asking for that.”
L’chaim co-founder Michael Zoosman added that “despite the fact this horrific act occurred during one of his blackouts, Jedidiah has admitted his guilt and has demonstrated sincere contrition.”
Texas executes prisoners by lethal injection, a method that Bonowitz and Zoosman say poses additional moral issues for Jews because it’s how the Nazis murdered children and others deemed disabled or mentally incompetent.
“The shadow of the Holocaust is inextricably linked to our firm rejection of the death penalty in all cases, even for the Tree of Life synagogue shooter,” said Zoosman. He was referring to the gunman who murdered 11 Jews in 2018 in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in the worst antisemitic attack in U.S. history. Jurors sentenced that attacker to death on Aug. 2.
Murphy’s Jewish roots
Murphy is one of a dozen death-row prisoners identified by L’chaim as Jewish nationwide.
In response to a query from the Forward about his Jewish heritage, Murphy said in an email that his mother, like him, had been adopted and was told by her adoptive parents that “she was Jewish and a Hoffman.” He added that the inmate identification card assigned to him “says JEWISH. It’s always been that way. Anyone that knows anything about prison knows this. You DO NOT come to prison as Jewish for fun. This is the worst place in the world for a Jewish person to be. Yet I have walked for 23 years in pride of my heritage.”
Murphy was also deemed halachically Jewish by Rabbi Dovid Goldstein, director of Chabad-Lubavitch of West Houston and lead Jewish chaplain in the Texas prison system. In 2016, Goldstein got permission to provide Murphy with tefillin, and Murphy performed the tefillin-wrapping ritual as Goldstein coached him from behind the glass that separates prisoners and visitors. The brief ceremony, in which Murphy donned a yarmulke, was described by Chabad as the bar mitzvah Murphy never had as a child.
Death row in Texas
Taking a prisoner off death row in Texas requires action by both the governor and the state Board of Pardons and Paroles. The governor has the power to grant a temporary reprieve in death penalty cases, but the sentence cannot be changed unless the board recommends clemency and the governor then grants it.
Texas has the third-highest number of people on death row, behind California and Florida, and has executed 577 prisoners since 1982. In the four decades since then, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles has recommended clemency in only five cases, and in only three of those cases did the governor grant clemency.
Abbott accepted one clemency recommendation from the parole board when he commuted a death sentence for Thomas Whitaker to life in prison in 2018.
Abbott’s press office did not immediately respond to an email and phone request for comment.
Correction: The original version of this article misidentified a congregation in Texas that is advocating for clemency in this case. It is Makom Shelanu of Fort Worth.
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