Saving David Powell
David Lee Powell has received an execution date of June 15, 2010. This is a very serious date. Please go to the What You Can Do page for information about actions you can do. And check back for further updates and actions.
Donations for the ongoing documentary effort, "Saving David Powell" are needed and any amount is welcome (PayPal may show the payee as loveacid films, a production company associated with the project)
I testified in Austin, Texas on behalf of a young man (Powell) who had become deeply involved with amphetamines. I had, a few years prior to this trial, published a book on amphetamines (The American Speed Culture: Amphetamines in the USA Today, Harvard University Press, 1973). It was clear to me that this young man had been using so much speed that he had developed what is called an amphetamine psychosis which is all but clinically indistinguishable from an acute paranoid schizophrenic reaction. This is a psychosis that lasts no more than a week. I was convinced that this young man was suffering from such a paranoid psychosis at the time this crime was committed. I testified after a psychiatrist, who was referred to as Dr. Death, had testified in support of the death penalty. It was clear to me in the courtroom that there was considerable, palpable hostility toward "this Harvard psychiatrist, who had come here to Texas to tell us what to do with our murderers"; the whole experience made me very uncomfortable and I knew then that what I had said would be ignored. It deeply disturbs me to think that there is a "justice system" so out of contact with justice and humane values that it would behave this way.
Lester Grinspoon MD
Harvard Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry