Texas is scheduled to execute two people this week. On Wednesday, May 12, Kevin Varga (left) is set to die. He has a sixth grade education.Thursday, May 13, Billy Galloway (left) is set to receive a lethal injection. Galloway also only completed the sixth grade in school.
If he is executed, Varga will be the 455th person executed in Texas since 1982 and the 216th person since Rick Perry became governor. Galloway will be the 456th since 1982 and the 217th under Perry. They will be the 8th and 9th executions in Texas in 2010.
Use the Governor's email form to contact Perry to express your opposition to this execution. Or call Perry and leave a voice mail at 512 463 1782. If you live in Texas, call your state legislators and let them know that you support a moratorium on executions. Find out who your legislators are here.
From the Houston Chronicle (05/11/2010):
Kevin Varga and Billy Galloway, who shared a prison cell in South Dakota, are set to be executed in Texas for the 1998 robbery-slaying of a man during a cross-country crime spree.
Varga was scheduled for execution Wednesday evening, while Galloway was set to die 24 hours later. Both were 41 years old. The back-to-back lethal injections would be the eighth and ninth this year in the nation's busiest capital punishment state.
Robin Norris, Varga's attorney, said Tuesday the seven-member Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles unanimously rejected his request that Varga's sentence be commuted to life. A companion request for a reprieve attracted only one vote, he said. No last-day appeals were planned.
Mick Mickelsen, Galloway's lawyer, said his legal efforts also were exhausted.
Varga and Galloway and two women — one of them only 17 at the time — left Sioux Falls, S.D., on Sept. 1, 1998. Evidence showed that over the following week, they robbed and fatally beat a man in Wichita, Kan., then robbed and killed David Logie, 37, an Army officer they met at a motel bar in Greenville, east of Dallas. Logie, from Fayetteville, N.C., was in Texas on business.
The four fled in Logie's car and were arrested days later in San Antonio. The two women were picked up at a Wal-Mart parking lot in the stolen car. The two men were at a strip club.
Their Kansas victim, David McCoy, 48, of Wichita, was found wrapped in sheets in Galloway's SUV abandoned a few blocks from the hotel where he'd been killed.
Varga and Galloway had been cellmates in prison in South Dakota.
Varga, a native of Kalamazoo, Mich., served about half of a 10-year term for grand theft then was paroled in May 1998. Galloway, originally from Onondaga, N.Y., was serving time for theft, parole violation and attempted robbery. He was paroled in June 1998, three months before the spree.
"I have no misconception or doubts about what my future holds," Galloway told The Associated Press. "I'm gone."
Varga declined an interview request from The Associated Press.
Source: Texas Moratorium Network, May 11, 2010
Family of condemned man shares last full day
Death row inmate Kevin Varga didn’t get the reprieve he wanted, but he did get the forgiveness he needed from at least 1 person.
Varga's 20-year-old stepson, Stephen Smith of Rapid City, said he and his younger brother, Richard, aren't the same kind of victims as the family of David Logie, but their lives also were forever changed by the murder.
"I would never say I think of myself as a victim like the families of the people who were lost," Stephen said. "But we were definitely victims, because we lost our father. He left us up in South Dakota to do whatever he wanted to do. That's how I feel victimized."
On Tuesday, in what will almost certainly be Varga's last full day of life, his sons and his mother, Beth Varga, spent the day with their dad and son inside the Polunsky Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (left). That imposing structure of concrete and concertina wire sits about 5 miles outside of Livingston and holds the 319 men on death row. There, Stephen asked the only father he has ever known the question that haunted his childhood: "Why me and Richard weren’t enough for him?"
Why, he always wanted to know, did his father choose to leave his kids for a trip to Mexico that turned into a crime spree that David Logie robbed and beaten to death.
"I've finally forgiven him. That's the one thing I told him today -- that I've finally forgiven him for that," Stephen said. There was no answer, but the power of that forgiveness brought tears and a sense of peace to both father and son, he said.
"When you forgive them, you kind of get that piece back from them that they took from you," he said. "It was a relief on both our parts."
Kevin Varga lost his final appeals for clemency on Monday night, when the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole unanimously denied his attorney's plea for a commutation to a life sentence, as well as his request for a short reprieve to give Robin Norris time to explore other appellate issues. One member of the 7-member board voted in favor of a reprieve for Varga, leaving little official leeway for Gov. Rick Perry to make any last-minute stay of execution today.
After 10 years on death row, Varga will make the 40-mile trip from Livingston to the death chamber in Huntsville sometime after noon today. He will travel through countryside that looks remarkably like scenes from the George Clooney prison-break movie, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" It is lined with thick woodlands and dotted with Baptist churches as it crosses the impounded Trinity River that forms massive Lake Livingston.
Beth Varga will witness her son's execution today at 6 p.m., but Varga's sons will not attend. "If Kevin has 2 seconds of life left in him, they're my 2 seconds. He's my son," she said.
Richard Varga, 18, said the final hours he is spending with his dad have been filled with memories and family stories. "Everyone in my family is pretty good at hiding their emotions. In my family, everyone's got a big mouth and just won't shut up," he said. "To be honest, part of me just doesn't want to know what he’s feeling."
The family jokes that "We're not the Brady Bunch," but said they are "savoring" what little time they have left together.
"We just kind of reminisce about the good times that we did have, because we don't really have anything left other than that," Stephen said.
Stephen lives in Rapid City with his uncle, Sean Varga. He bears an uncanny facial resemblance to both his uncle and his father, despite having no biological connection to them, said Beth Varga. Stephen was 11 months old when Kevin Varga came into his life. "I'm here because these guys are all I have," Stephen said of Beth, Richard and Sean.
Richard has a baby face and a tough shell of detachment that comes with having a father on death row. Because he inherited his father's build, he also inherited the suit that Kevin Varga last wore at his sentencing for the robbery/murder of David Logie in 1998.
"I didn't hide it, but it didn't come up much," Richard said. "If people asked, I told them my dad was in prison."
Both young men kept in periodic contact with their dad while he has been on death row, but visits have been limited by long distances and lack of money. They spent the summer of 2002 living in Texas with their grandmother and visited regularly, but since their return to South Dakota, contact has been sporadic.
"Writing letters was hard. Too hard," said Stephen. He recently discovered his dad's death row blog and said he wasn't surprised by the reflection and writing he found there.
"I've always known Dad to be a smart man," he said.
Richard barely knew his father, who has been in prison most of his young life. He refuses to feel sorry for himself, he said.
"There's persons worse off than me. I know I'm not the 1st person to go through this," he said.
To cope with an absent father, Richard turned to a circle of friends in Sioux Falls.
"Because my dad did this, I have a way bigger family than I would have had otherwise," he said. "My best friends are my family."
Stephen and Richard have done stints at the South Dakota Department of Corrections youth facility in Custer. Both are unemployed, and both said they want to make better choices than their father did.
"I try to stay on the straight and narrow. I stray off some times. Grandma helps me a lot," Stephen said.
On Tuesday, Beth Varga drew her spiritual strength from Psalm 146. Like that scripture, which warns "do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men, who cannot save," she has put her faith in God. It goes on to promise that the "Lord sets prisoners free" and "sustains the fatherless."
Her son and grandsons will need both those promises today.
Source: Rapid City Journal, May 12, 2010
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