The Impending Execution of Yokamon Hearn

Yokamon Laneal Hearn sits on death row awaiting execution by the people of Texas, tomorrow, 18 July 2012. It seems unlikely he will survive the day.

I do not find a good summary of his case in any appellate decision available online. I therefore excerpt from a lengthy Amnesty International article about Hearn's case. 

On 26 March 1998, the body of Frank Meziere, a 23-year-old finance graduate from Texas A&M University who had been working with Merrill Lynch in Dallas for the previous eight months, was found in a field near a water treatment plant in Oak Cliff, southwest Dallas. He had last been seen alive the previous evening at a restaurant in the Upper Greenville area in the north of the city. After leaving the restaurant, he had apparently gone to a coin-operated carwash to wash his car and had been spotted by a group of youths in a nearby 7-Eleven store who were looking to steal a car. Two hours after his body was discovered, Frank Meziere’s abandoned Ford Mustang was found in the car park of a shopping centre about five miles (eight kilometres) away in East Kiest, Dallas. 

Yokamon Hearn and Delvin Diles were arrested at a motel in Dallas on 29 March 1998. 

In an interview that weekend, Yokamon Hearn’s mother described Yokamon, her only child, as “a little slow, to be honest… He’s like a 15-year-old”. Having spoken to him by phone on 29 March after his arrest, she said that he was “trying not to break down, but I could hear the scaredness in his voice”. 

Yokamon Hearn could not afford a lawyer so he was appointed one by the trial judge. 

Yokamon Hearn’s current lawyers have argued that his conduct following the crime – including what the prosecution portrayed to the jury as remorselessness and a reason for the death penalty – provide an insight into his mental deficiencies:

Mr Hearn drove the murder victim’s car back to the house of one of his co-defendants. Someone told him to leave the car somewhere else, and another person directed him to leave it in the parking lot of a shopping center. Mr Hearn left the car in a shopping center parking lot, as directed, but failed to take minimal steps to ensure that the car would be inconspicuous. The lights were left on and the trunk was left open, thereby drawing attention of an individual who notified the police. In addition, Mr Hearn left the victim’s wallet with a friend, Aaron Runnels, who was himself impaired. A relative of Mr Runnels found the wallet in Mr Runnels’ room, where it had been left in plain sight. 

After the commission of the crime, Mr Hearn boasted to others that he had killed someone. One person explained [at the trial] that Mr Hearn, ‘was trying to make himself look… like a big person… [He] was talking loud, walking around, smiling. He kept repeating what they did and he said he killed a white boy…’ Aaron Runnels testified that the day after the murder, Mr Hearn was waving a newspaper article about the case, ‘telling everybody that he killed the man.’

In 2006, Yokamon Hearn’s current lawyers obtained sworn statements from his three codefendants, Delvin Diles, Teresa Shavonn Shirley, and Dwight Paul Burley, all serving sentences at that time in various facilities in Texas for their roles in the abduction and killing of Frank Meziere. 

Delvin Diles said: “The night Mr Meziere died, it was Dwight’s idea to go jacking. Jacking meant to take someone’s car. Before we got to the 7-Eleven, there was no plan to kill Mr Meziere or anyone else. Once we were at the 7-Eleven, the fact that we didn't have masks to cover our faces came up. I said that we should kill Mr Meziere and Yogi [Yokamon] said he was cool with it. It was never Yogi’s idea to kill the man”. 

Teresa Shirley said:“Yogi was an ‘impressionist’. When I say that Yogi was an ‘impressionist’, I mean that he did things to impress the guys in the group… The night Mr Meziere got shot, the plan was to go to North Dallas and ‘hit a lick’. To ‘hit a lick’ means to rob someone. I know that the plan was not to kill anyone because when we returned to Dwight’s house after Mr Meziere got shot, Dwight and Yogi got into a fight. Dwight was yelling at Yogi asking him why he shot the guy, why he did that”. 

Dwight Burley said: “Yogi rolled with the flow. Yogi followed along with what the group decided… Yogi was a follower. He didn't have the skills to be a leader. When we went to North Dallas the day Mr Meziere got killed, the plan was not to kill anyone. We only planned to get money. The whole thing wasn’t supposed to be like it happened. There was no plan, it just happened. He never said he was going to shoot the guy”. 

On 10 December 1998 – the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – the 12 jurors deliberated for about 50 minutes before rejecting Yokamon Hearn’s not guilty plea and finding him guilty of the murder of Frank Meziere. “We’re pleased with the verdict and the speed of the verdict”, the prosecutor was quoted as saying afterwards.  

The speed continued. The sentencing hearing began on that same day and ended on the next, 11 December 1998. The jury deliberated for about an hour before handing down a death sentence. 

At the conclusion of the sentencing phase, the jury had been asked to consider a question, namely: “Do you find from the evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that there is a probability that the defendant, Yokamon Laneal Hearn, would commit criminal acts of violence in the future that would constitute a continuing threat to society?” A jury’s affirmative response to the so-called “future dangerousness” question is a prerequisite for a death sentence in Texas. Such a sentencing scheme asks a jury to engage in little more than crystal ball gazing – predicting human behaviour based on an individual’s past conduct. Prosecutors encourage jurors to vote for death by painting a picture of a dangerously irredeemable defendant, and perhaps by stoking fear of crime. Arguing for the death penalty at the 2011 murder trial of teenaged offender Cortne Mareese Robinson, for example, a Texas prosecutor told the jury that a razor blade had been found in Robinson’s possession while in pre-trial custody. “The World Trade Center was brought down by a razor blade,” the prosecutor said. 

The jury voted for death. 

In Yokamon Hearn’s case, the prosecution presented evidence that the defendant had boasted to friends that the killing had made the headlines. The case “proved that criminals read the paper”, the lead prosecutor said immediately after Hearn’s trial. “Hopefully, the next group of would-be criminals will read this paper about Yokamon Hearn getting the death penalty and it will be a deterrent”. 

In the absence of proof of any special deterrent effect of the death penalty, hope – rather than any guarantee – that the death penalty will deter murder is all there can be for its advocates. Hope is an unsafe platform on which to base an irrevocable punishment. 

Forty years ago, concurring in the decision to end the death penalty in the USA as then being applied, US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall referred to this absence of proof: “Despite the fact that abolitionists have not proved non-deterrence beyond a reasonable doubt, they have succeeded in showing by clear and convincing evidence that capital punishment is not necessary as a deterrent to crime in our society. This is all that they must do. We would shirk our judicial responsibilities if we failed to accept the presently existing statistics and demanded more proof. It may be that we now possess all the proof that anyone could ever hope to assemble on the subject.”

For a complete explanation of Amnesty International's opposition to Hearn's execution, visit their summary at the link provided above.

It is my public and unwavering strategy to oppose only those executions in which I feel the person to be executed may be innocent of the crime for which he is to die. In all other case, I stand mute regarding the propriety of the execution. I neither support it nor oppose it.

In the case of Yokamon Hearn, I stand mute.

ADDENDUM (18 July 2012):
Yokamon Hearn was executed by the people of Texas on 18 July 2012. He was pronounced dead after an injection of pentobarbital. Cause of death will be recorded as "Homicide", the killing of one human by another.