Reported by: Delaine Mathieu
HOUSTON (AP) - Texas' 111 prisons holding some 155,000 inmates were locked down after Gov. Rick Perry ordered a systemwide search of the nation's second-largest prison system for contraband following a convicted killer's threatening calls to a state senator made from a cell phone smuggled to him on death row.
Lorraine Tabler, 60, the mother of condemned prisoner Richard Tabler, was arrested and jailed for buying the minutes authorities say her son and nine other death row inmates used for some 2,800 phone calls over the past month, including the calls to Sen. John Whitmire.
She was apprehended Monday at an airport in Austin as she arrived from her home in Georgia. She had planned to head to death row at the Polunsky Unit outside Livingston in East Texas, about 170 miles east of Austin, for a scheduled visit with her son.
As she was being hauled off to jail to await a bond hearing, Richard Tabler was being confronted by officers in his death row cell to surrender the illegal phone. He did so peacefully, officials said.
"Let there be no doubt about how seriously we take this security breach," Perry said, directing prison officials to impose the lockdown that will keep all prisoners from receiving visits and tighten security checks for all prison employees, staff and visitors who now could be subjected to pat-down searches as they enter prisons. People entering the Polunsky Unit already go through airport-style metal detectors.
Whitmire is the Texas Senate's senior member and chairman of the legislative committee that oversees the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
The Houston Democrat summoned prison administrators to Austin for an emergency meeting Tuesday of his criminal justice panel to address what he called "a lax attitude on contraband."
"I want to know how an inmate on death row gets a cell phone in the first place, and then how they and other inmates can make thousands of calls in a month without getting caught," Whitmire told the Austin American-Statesman.
Richard Tabler's call to Whitmire on Oct. 7 prompted the investigation. The prisoner's calls continued intermittently, the latest coming Sunday, according to investigators. In the calls, Tabler told Whitmire he knew the lawmaker's daughters, their ages and their addresses.
"He called his daughters by name," John Moriarty, the prison system's inspector general, said, adding that he expected additional arrests from the continuing investigation. He wouldn't say if those likely to be arrested were inside or outside prison.
Perry's office said a bribed corrections officer was believed the source of the phone, but the officer's name and whether he or she had been apprehended were not disclosed.
"It is a shame that the criminal acts of some overshadow the good name of others," Perry said, demanding zero tolerance for contraband. Any violations would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, he said.
"It's a security issue, obviously, and a serious concern," Moriarty said.
He said each of the 2,800 calls from the confiscated phone would be investigated.
Lorraine Tabler was held on felony charges of providing a prohibited item to an inmate. It was not immediately known if she had an attorney. Messages left at a phone number for her in Blackshear, Ga., were not immediately returned.
Richard Tabler has been on death row since last year for a shooting spree in which two men and two teenage girls were killed in Bell County in central Texas during Thanksgiving weekend 2004.
"Whether it's a citizen or a senator, no one should be contacted by an incarcerated offender who is using an illegal cell phone," Criminal Justice Board chairman Oliver Bell, a Perry appointee, said Monday.
Investigators determined the phone had been purchased in Waco in September 2007, that Lorraine Tabler had been buying time for the phone, including a purchase on Oct. 7 at a Wal-Mart store in Waycross, Ga. Detectives obtained a store video showing the woman making the purchase.
The investigation also determined calls were coming to the phone as well as going out.
Moriarty said the phone apparently was being passed among the other nine inmates in Tabler's immediate cell block area. Like Tabler, they also face possible criminal charges or disciplinary actions.
According to an arrest warrant affidavit from an investigator from the inspector general's office in Polk County, where the Polunsky Unit is based, 44 calls were made on the phone to Lorraine Tabler's home number. The same phone was used to call Whitmire.
The warrant said an examination of cell site records determined the calls were coming from inside the prison, where cell phones are barred.
Early this month, Tabler was in court in Belton telling a Bell County judge he wanted to end appeals and volunteer for execution.
The Killeen man was convicted last year of fatally shooting Mohamed-Amine Rahmouni, 25, and Haitham Zayed, 28. He also confessed to killing Tiffany Dotson, 18, and Amber Benefield, 16. All four had ties to a Killeen strip club.
A call to Richard Tabler's trial lawyer Monday was not immediately returned.
Illegal cell phone use is a continuing problem in prisons where the phones are considered a security breach and of particular value to gang members.
Moriarty said since Jan. 1, his investigators have closed or are working on 19 cases of prohibited phones or phone components on death row. But he said that's just a tiny portion of some 700 cases investigated systemwide this year, including one where officials have an X-ray of an inmate with a phone and charger inside the prisoner's body.
He said of particular interest among inmates, and the target of searches by officers, are postage-stamp-size subscriber identify modules, known as SIM cards. The cards are easily hidden and allow easy transfer of information from one phone to another.
Email: DelaineMathieu@woaitv.com
For a report from inside Polunsky's death Row unit please read Mark Stroman's blog
For the the response from Texas Department of Criminal Justice please go to Filmmaker's Diary
A Dangerous Game of Words
 Last week hysteria and raw fear erupted among McCain supporters. Voices were heard at rallies shouting, “Terrorist!” “Traitor!” and even, “Kill him!” A sheriff in uniform at a Florida rally brayed repeatedly about “Barack Hussein Obama.” (Anyone remember the last time the GOP candidate was referred to by his full name, John Sidney McCain?) Immediately the media heaped shame upon the McCain campaign for the crowd’s wrath. At some point, it became too much for McCain himself, whose running mate jeers Obama for “palling around with terrorists.” In response to a woman at a Minnesota rally who stood and said, "I don't trust Obama. I have read about him and he's an Arab," McCain shook his head, "No ma'am, no ma'am, he’s not,” he replied. “He’s a decent family man...[a] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues. That's what this campaign is all about."
 In the way that news is digested and forgotten in a shockingly brief moment, the media moved on. A panel of African-American journalists and academics discussing race and the campaign at a Time/CNN political conference spoke little about the fury from only a week earlier.
It’s comforting to dismiss verbal expressions of violence as the ranting of a few fringe individuals. Sadly, however, the world knows it only takes one who believes the mainstream has validated his thinking to turn harmful words into deadly action. After the 1995 assassination of Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at a peace rally in Tel Avi’s Kings of Israel Square, hundreds of articles and reports examined the incendiary atmosphere before the murder.
The road to Rabin’s assassination began as it usually does in the margins of society. Extreme right-wing groups condemned Rabin’s role in the Oslo Peace Accords with Yassar Arafat as a supreme betrayal, giving holy land to terrorists. Posters depicting Rabin as a Nazi, or effigies of him in SS uniform, appeared at rallies for “mainstream” politicians, among them Benjamin Nethanyu and Ariel Sharon, who ignored cries of “traitor!” Such charges seeped into the mainstream discussion and media. After Rabin’s death, journalists, government officials and others pondered whether they shared in the creation of an environment that allowed Rabin’s killer–who told the court Rabin wanted to “give our country to the Arabs” – to believe that his radical thinking was legitimized because it wasn’t condemned.
 Should the expressions of hate at recent McCain/Palin rallies be written off as marginal and irrelevant? Certainly race is often interjected in presidential campaigns. Remember Willie Horton? “Willie Horton was one ad in a campaign,” says Matt Taibbi, political writer for Rolling Stone and author of The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire. “This is four or five different avenues of attacks in the last few weeks of a campaign season. It’s totally immoral and it’s conscious.”
The attacks don’t need to be inherently anti-black, just anti-Other, whether based on race, gender, religion or culture. “The technique these people use is to dehumanize the opponent and his or her followers,” Taibbi says. “The softest example is ‘liberal,’ but politicians are more than willing to use ‘terrorist,’ ‘traitor,’ ‘communist,’ all words the GOP has used this election. You repeat them enough, people get to a place intellectually where they don’t see the other side as fully human – and someone might do something about it. When Palin says, ‘he doesn’t see America like you and I do,’ her speechwriters know they’re playing a dangerous game, but they hope nothing happens.”
 The U.S. Secret Service considers the threatening language seriously enough to announce if the individual is found who yelled “Kill him!’ at a Palin rally in Scranton, PA, the agency will hand him or her over to federal prosecutors. (Senator Obama was assigned a secret service detail earlier than any other presidential candidate in history.) After the rally, CNN contributor David Gergen warned, "There is this free floating sort of whipping around anger that could really lead to some violence. I think we're not far from that…it’s really imperative that the candidates try to calm people down."
At another rally McCain declared, “I admire Senator Obama and his accomplishments, I will respect him.” When the audience began to boo, he kept talking: “I want everyone to be respectful and let’s make sure we are, because that’s the way politics should be conducted in America." At which point, the New York Times reported, the crowd applauded.
“I think deep down John McCain is turned off by this kind of politics,” Taibbi says. “He was a victim of it himself in 2000 when people said his Bangladeshi-born adopted daughter was his own, illegitimate black child. I think if he weren’t running for president, he wouldn’t do this. Now he has surrogates do it for him.”
Yet Taibbi sees an optimistic outcome if Obama wins. “The current attacks are straight forward, not coded or veiled; this time they’re questioning directly, are you ready to have a black president? And if we find a large majority of people say yes, it will be the death knell to this kind of politics. It’s ugly now because it worked before, but if the numbers don’t turn out to help their cause, why would anyone do it ever again?”
Past In Depth Articles
Hate Versus Hope
Hate Groups' New Target: McCain
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