Quem é Roger Mc Gowen

Who is Roger W. McGowen?

Roger, an African-American, was born in Texas on Dec. 23, 1963 in Houston's tough Fifth Ward.

1. Roger's Youth

Roger was born on December 23, 1963 in 5th Ward, then one of the worst ghettos of Houston, Texas, the seventh of ten children. His parents divorced when he was still a child. Most of his youth was spent with his mother, a profoundly devoted Baptist, and a few years during adolescence with his father James. The 3rd Ward, where his father lived was less tough and unstructured, and Roger keeps a luminous memory of those years. Schools were slightly better, the streets tidier, people more open. His step-mother, Ernestine, encouraged him in his school work, and he formed a strong attachment to his half-brother Terry. His father was an electronic hydraulic engineer. He was killed in 1982, after someone tried to rob him, at 42, just as Roger was turning 18.

During his whole life, Roger kept in very close contact with his mother, who communicated her very lively faith to her son. In a brief, 10 page autobiographical document Roger described his mother in a manner that shows the profound impact she had on him:

”My mother was a lady who believed strongly in God and looked for the good in every one. She taught us the value of life, and also the heart ache of pain, which comes from suffering. She was the strongest person I ever knew in my life, and she remained that way till she was called home to God. And many of the lessons she taught me have remained with me till this very day. But at the time, when she was imparting her wisdom to me, I had no use for it. I was young and thought that I knew everything, only to learn that when I thought I understood, I found that I only misunderstood. So often we take the wisdom of our the elders for granted, not realising that we have not even begun to encounter half the things which they have experienced, the experiences that will eventually make or break us, as one says. My mother would tell me: “Roger, wisdom does not come from age, it comes from experience. It comes from countless encounters with the things that life will show us, give us or take away from us”.

It would be years before I would realise what she was talking about. And even today, I call upon her wisdom, from the grave where she now rests, to sustain me and guide me through the perils of a sometimes cold world.”

Life in the ghetto – or rather survival – was tough. When about ten years old, Roger started to work outside school with his uncle Jimmy. He had a large, 18-wheel truck. Later, he found a job in a restaurant. “When I was nine-ten years old, I was purchasing clothes for my sister Rhonda.” He started training for a job, but had to abandon the training to help his mother when his grandmother died.

Rogers’ elder brother Charles was, in Rogers’ own terms, his idol. It is important to understand their quasi symbiotic relationship to grasp what happened later, when Roger was accused of murder. “My eldest brother was well known around our neighbourhood. He was known for not being one to mess with, and being his little brother, I was privileged not to be messed with either, unless you wanted to deal with Charles.

"Man, could he fight. I saw him fight a guy one day for beating up one of his friends. It wasn’t really a fight. He hit the guy, and the guy hit the ground. But in other fights I watched him weave and bob and slip punches. I thought he could whip Mohammed Ali, the then heavyweight champion of the world.

"He and I were very close. I would try and follow him and his friends. He would see me and run me back home. But sometimes I would follow them from a distance, without them knowing. I tried to walk like him, talk like him, practically become him. He was my idol then. He was great. He used to talk to me and tell me things about him and his friends and swear me to secrecy. I thought I was carrying a real top secret and was ready to defend it with my life, if need be. Thank God it never came to that.”

Charles had brushes with the police very soon. At one time he was even charged with murder, but as he was still an adolescent, he was sent to a juvenile facility.

Shortly before passing on, their mother was taken to the hospital where she stayed quite a few days in a coma. In a letter dated March 6, 2005, Roger gave me the following details of this experience which would play such a crucial role in his life. Roger was visiting his mother, and “she came out of her coma. She was speaking very incoherently. She would start talking about one thing, then right in the middle [of the sentence] about something else. She realized it too, and started smiling. She said to me, ‘Roger, I don’t want to die, but I feel there’s nothing between me and God. I’m young, I have a lot to live for, but I’m at peace. If I don’t make it, look out for your brother. You are strong and always have been, and you’ve had it good. Your brother hasn’t. He can’t go back to prison. You are the backbone of the family. Take care of them.’ One of the nurses came into the room, and saw me talking to her, and realized she had come out of her coma. She rushed me from the room and that was the last conversation I had with her.”

At the time of the crime for which he was accused, Roger was 22 years old and worked full time. He was caring for his sisters, who lived the other side of town. He would stop by regularly to inquire about their well being, bring them food and make sure their bills were paid.

A member of his extended family who had the key to Rogers’car (he was the only one of his mother’s children to have one, and shared it generously) one day borrowed it. He was accompanied by Charles. They went to a bar to perpetrate a holdup. Witnesses took down the number plates of the car. Later the police arrested Roger at his apartment and accused him of the murder.

Because he wanted to protect his brother whom he then believed was responsible for the crime, Roger initially agreed to take the rap. As in his view of things, nothing tied him to the crime, he felt certain his innocence would become evident, especially as he had an alibi. Also, because of his mother’s death, he was going through a depression. He didn’t care what could happen to him. He felt the weight of the world on his shoulders. He hoped that through this sacrifice, he could show his brother how much he loved him, and that this would lead to Charles breaking with delinquency and changing his way of living. However, Charles was shot down by the police attempting a hold-up soon after Roger's arrest. This was probably one of the toughest experiences in his life: the man for whom he had taken the rap – and a penalty of death – being killed. His sacrifice seemed at that moment completely useless.

As is usually the case with poor African-Americans, he had a state appointed lawyer who never visited him once before the trial. The attorney prepared his plea on the basis of the police report. At different times during the trial, his own lawyer fell asleep.

2. The Trial

The trial was characterized by major judicial and constitutional errors.

As is alas not rare in the US, the district attorney contacted an inmate in prison, whom Roger had known as an adolescent, but whom Roger had not seen for ten years. Such people are called jail “snitches” and there is a unspoken agreement that if a snitch agrees to testify against an accused person he will receive a substantial reduction of his sentence. So this inmate invented about 1500 holdups he purportedly committed with Roger over a two and a half year period … despite the fact that Roger was working full time!

Roger wrote, “In one instance, [the snitch] said he and I robbed this old man who was a security guard at a supermarket. The prosecutor contacted the man and had him testify for the prosecution against me. [The snitch] said I had the knife and I was going to kill the man. But when the elderly gentleman took the stand he said it wasn’t me! He said it was [the snitch] and someone else.”

Also, Rogers’ lawyer never attempted to verify the convincing alibi he had. Two of Rogers’ sisters contacted the lawyer to inform him, but he never attempted to check this alibi, which could have saved Roger. His sister Rose Ayers ran after his lawyer and caught him on the steps of the court to tell him Roger was at her home. He did nothing with this piece of information and many others. These major mistakes constitute a serious violation on the lawyer’s part of the 6th amendment of the US Constitution, and of article I, section 10 of the Constitution of the State of Texas.
Neither did the lawyer attempt to contest serious breaches in the behavior of the jury. They alone would have justified a new trial. A few examples:

• In the room where they met, the jury had access to articles presenting a highly biased view of the crime, in which the police falsely claimed that Roger had committed about fifty armed hold-ups.

• One of the jury members, confirmed under oath that a former policeman and member of the jury had introduced in the deliberations of the jury information not presented in the court which influenced the decision of the jury in favor of the death penalty. Yet Texas law states clearly that “the presence of one partial juror on the jury destroys the impartiality of the body and renders it partial”. This ex-policeman was biased all through the trial and clearly made other jurors tip in favor of the death penalty.

• Various members of the jury were not in favor of the death penalty, but because of the strong personality of the former policeman who presented himself as an expert, they finally gave in. (This represents a violation of section 19 of the Constitution of the State of Texas, Due Course of Law).

• In violation of the US Constitution and the law, the judge refused to deliver instructions to the jury on the difference between voluntary homicide and voluntary homicide with premeditation

• Whereas the jury initially voted 11 to 1 for life imprisonment (hence against the death penalty), the judge presented information which erroneously implied that if Roger were condemned to prison for life, he would only spend a third of the time in jail and then be released. This untruthful information also caused the jury to switch its position in favor the death penalty.

Rogers’ first lawyer – whose defense was a mockery of justice - was reprimanded five times by the Texas Bar Association. He was finally forbidden from taking any death penalty cases by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals – alas too late in Rogers' case.

3. Developments since the Trial
Those are but a very few of the grave irregularities which marred the trial. Roger appealed the judgment, and was given a second lawyer who did not contact him for well over four years. Finally, Roger was able to reach him by phone. (In his first prison, Ellis One Unit in Huntsville, inmates could make two phone calls a year. This is no longer possible in the Alan Polunsky Unit where all Texas death row inmates are presently held). The lawyer informed him he had decided not to take the case, because one of the policemen on the case was a close friend of his! Roger asked him why he had needed over four years to come to this conclusion.

The second state appointed lawyer, when Roger entered the room where they met, asked him point blank, without even greeting him, “Why did you kill her?”(her = the owner of the bar who was shot). Roger politely told him he did not need a lawyer who had already made up his mind concerning his supposed guilt, and declined his services.

This is the system which enables inmates to spend up to 30 years on death row without being executed – surely one of the most unusual and cruel forms of punishment ever to exist in a civilized country. Roger has been in prison since the age of 23. He is now over 43 years old.

Thanks to a correspondent living in Switzerland, a group of friends in that country got together and gathered funds to hire a private lawyer, Gary Taylor, who used to practice law in Texas (and who defended Odell Barnes, whose case became world famous and in favor of whom even the pope intervened). In 1998, Gary Taylor presented a Writ of Habeas Corpus, the legal document demanding a new trial, in the Court of Criminal Appeals, State of Texas, and in the District Court of Harris County Texas (which by the way holds by a very large margin the US record for the death penalty.)

In the summer of 2005, Gary Taylor left Texas and another state appointed lawyer replaced him. This lawyer left Texas in the summer of 2006. That same year, an international support group with members in six countries was formed to help Roger. Roger asked the group to hire a new private lawyer, which was done in the fall of 2006. He is Anthony Haughton of Houston, Texas, who is now facing the very challenging task of putting together a new defense since the Court of Criminal Appeals rejected the earlier Writ of Habeas Corpus, claiming it had been filed too late.

During his first five years on Death Row, Roger did not receive a single visit. Little by little, this self-taught, modest hero of self-development and the spiritual path, started the long slow climb which enables him today to be an inspiration to hundreds of people across the world, and a teacher and model for many others.

“I believe in my heart that one day
I will walk out of here. I have never
thought otherwise”
(Roger, letter to S., 6.6.04)

Disclaimer: No information contained on this web site implicate Mr. McGowen's 5th or 6th Amendment Legal Rights. Mr. McGowen has no access to this site or control over its content in any way. The site and the information contained herein is supported by Friends of Roger McGowen, and the opinions, information, and content presented herein are solely ours. Any information presented has been obtained from the public domain.