Dallas Morning News, April 13, 2000:
 
For almost as many years as Gary Graham has been on death row, he has claimed the support of Hollywood celebrities, national groups opposed to capital punishment and others who doubt the justice of his conviction in a 1981 killing.

Now, his 21-year-old son, Gary Lee Hawkins, has been charged with capital murder in a robbery-killing. The son was just 2 when his dad was sent to death row.

For some, it’s a troubling father-son case. Others wonder aloud about how quickly some have judged Mr. Hawkins. And there are questions about the way society and the justice system seem to consume young black men. 

“It’s sad all the way around,” said a neighbor of the son who knew both men. She asked not to be identified. 

Mr. Hawkins’ lawyer, Donald Davis, observed: “It’s been a . . .traumatic life for Mr. Hawkins, but that has nothing to do with his case. . . . He’s totally innocent.”

Without the Gary Graham-Gary Hawkins connection, the March 28 shooting death of Melvin Ray Pope, 32, although a tragedy, would have attracted little notice.

Police say Mr. Hawkins plotted with a friend to rob Mr. Pope, a mutual acquaintance, as he drove to pay his rent. Mr. Hawkins was riding in the back seat when he shot Mr. Pope in the head, homicide investigator Brian Harris said.

“According to our information, nothing was said. The shot was fired, the money was taken, they drove around the block in his car, dumped his body, then drove a quarter-mile or half-mile and dumped the car,” Officer Harris said.

Police charged Mr. Hawkins with capital murder. A suspected accomplice, Stanley White, 19, was charged with aggravated robbery. Mr. Hawkins and Mr. White are being held without bond.

The prosecutor to whom the case has been assigned said no determination has been made about whether Mr. Hawkins will face a capital trial. “It usually takes a few weeks to a month” to decide, said Assistant Harris County District Attorney Connie Spence.

But just the possibility of a father-son duo on Texas’ death row had the Houston media and advocacy groups on both sides of the death penalty issue in a froth.

“If Gary Graham had been executed many years ago, then perhaps his son would believe in the finality of the death penalty and would not have committed – allegedly committed – capital murder himself,” said Dianne Clements of Justice for All, a largely white Houston-based advocacy group.

That comment – which Ms. Clements later said she honestly believes but wishes she had phrased more carefully – prompted outrage among death penalty opponents and some members of the black community.

“If anyone is to blame . . . it is the wicked white supremacist criminal justice system,” said black Muslim leader Quanell X. “It was not Gary Graham who chose to stay out of his son’s life.”

Making judgments

Richard Burr, a volunteer lawyer who argues that the system has denied Mr. Graham a fair chance to prove his innocence, said that “if people are going to judge Gary Lee Hawkins by his father, they ought to assume he’s innocent.”

Those closest to Gary Lee Hawkins have had little to say. His family could not be reached for comment. His father, described by his lawyer as devastated by the news even though he barely knows his son, declined an interview request.

But a sketchy portrait emerged from interviews with people familiar with prison inmates’ families and people in the neighborhood where he grew up.

For any son who was a toddler when his father disappeared into the prison system, life is uphill, said Ray Hill, who served time in a Texas prison for burglary and went on to become a radio advocate for inmates and their families.

“His peers expect him to carry on the family tradition, especially when you’re talking about a minority, poverty community where it’s kind of a status to go to prison,” Mr. Hill said.

Police told reporters that, when arrested, Mr. Hawkins apparently was using his father’s name.

Growing up

Friends who sometimes provided Mr. Hawkins with a home away from home said he grew up like many others in largely black northeast Houston. It is an area crisscrossed by railroad yards and pocked with weedy vacant lots and boarded-up houses. But there are also well-kept bungalows with burglar bars and corner churches offering hope.

“When he was around us . . . he was just like any other black boy,” said a woman who asked not to be identified. But his mother had a hard time, and “he had to fend for himself, in my opinion, a whole lot of the time,” the friend said.

Mr. Hawkins had to deal with being Gary Graham’s son, another friend said. “Kids can be cruel,” she said. Eventually, “he closed the world off. He didn’t talk to anybody,” she said.

Still, the older woman said she was “stunned” at Mr. Hawkins’ latest arrest. “I never thought he was that kind of person,” she said. 

DeLoyd Parker of SHAPE Community Center, who has worked with troubled youths for 30 years, has seen it all before. 

“I see in Gary Hawkins what I see in so many young black men or black boys that come through SHAPE [Self-Help for African-American People through Education],” said Mr. Parker, cautioning that Mr. Hawkins is innocent until proven otherwise. “He’s angry. Why is he angry? Because of conditions that he had very little to do with being imposed on him.

“No person, good or bad, is created by any one person. He was created by all those conditions and people and institutions that had an impact on his life . . . [whether he be] fatherless, motherless, jobless, homeless or whether oppression and racism has taken its toll.”

Almost all of Mr. Hawkins’ interaction with his father would have occurred through prison bars, friends said.

But Officer Harris rejected suggestions that Mr. Hawkins’ problems were caused either by societal injustices or the fact that his father had been in prison nearly all of his life.
 
“I would definitely have to say that Gary Hawkins . . . made an adult decision and . . . an individual choice,” Officer Harris said of the robbery-killing.

Father’s case 

Mr. Graham, now known as Shaka Sankofa, went to death row when he was 17, convicted of killing 53-year-old Bobby Lambert of Tucson, Ariz., outside a Houston grocery store in May 1981.

Mr. Graham’s most recent execution date, in January 1999, was stayed by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The court later lifted the stay, but Mr. Graham’s lawyers have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to order that new evidence be heard in his case. No new date has been set. 

Sister Jean Amore, a supporter of Mr. Graham’s, once worked at St. Peter Claver Catholic Church, named for the patron saint of African slaves, in the neighborhood where Mr. Hawkins grew up. She was troubled by the son’s arrest.

Now assigned to her religious order’s headquarters in New Jersey, she visited Mr. Graham in prison last week as news of Mr. Hawkins’ arrest broke. “He loves his children [a son and a daughter] dearly, so he’s very concerned,” she said.

Mr. Hawkins’ arrest was not his first brush with the law. His troubles apparently began as a juvenile, although details of his juvenile record are not public. “He’s very familiar with the police,” Officer Harris said.

Troubled past 

He was arrested in October 1998 on a charge of possessing less than a gram of cocaine, pleaded guilty and served 120 days in jail. He was arrested again last

January and given 15 days for giving a false name to an officer who stopped him.
 
In a pretrial services report after the drug arrest, Mr. Hawkins said he had a 10th-grade education and a GED certificate that friends said he may have earned in a youthful offender rehabilitation program. Neither of the two high schools in his neighborhood have records indicating he ever attended.

He told the pretrial services interviewer in October 1998 that he was working as a “concrete pourer” making $300 a week. He also said he drove an 18-year-old Cadillac and had asthma. After his latest arrest, he qualified as an indigent for a court-appointed attorney.

“I wonder what they could be thinking,” said Mr. Hawkins’ friend, who said she has seen too many young black men in trouble with the law or dead before their time.

“I never believed his daddy did it, and here he is following in the same footsteps,” she said. “I sometimes wonder if there’s a curse on them.”