Dozens of condemned killers have MySpace.com accounts


Death row inmates keeping profiles on popular site
 By Andy Cerota

(11/11/06 - KTRK/HOUSTON) - MySpace.com is a way for people to connect, but now some city leaders are worried your kids are meeting killers.

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At least 30 death row inmates have had pages created for them on MySpace.com. Gabriel Gonzalez has one. Kenneth Foster, 30, has managed to get one, too. So did Omari, 25, and then there's Randy, the big kid at heart and hopeless romantic. Besides calling Livingston home, these men share something else.

"They all have one thing in common," said Andy Kahan with the mayor's crime victims office. "They killed either one human being or more."

They're all sitting on death row in Texas and each one his own MySpace.com web page, created for them by an outside source since inmates have no access to the Internet. Inmate websites are not new. Crime victim advocates point out that's not what MySpace.com is for.

"Young minds are easy to influence and I can't see why you would want to legitimize someone on death row and give them a universal platform to espouse their ideas," said Kahan.

"I am glad there are volunteers facilitating this," said Ray Hill, who's an advocate for prisoners' rights.

Death row or not, Hill doesn't see anything wrong with inmates using MySpace.com or any other website to connect with the outside world.

"If you're a living, breathing human being with ideas, your words are protected in our system," said Hill.

Remember Randy? His 76 MySpace.com friends may know all about his wacky sense of humor. What they may not know is he's Randy Halprin, one of the Texas seven, convicted in the 2000 shooting death of an Irving police officer.

We want to point out that MySpace.com does not create these pages for the inmates. We contacted the company's headquarters in California for a comment. We were unable to reach anybody.

Arizona had a state law on the books forbidding inmates from appearing on web sites. But in 2003, a federal judge ruled the law was unconstitutional. It made it a misdemeanor for an inmate to send letters to web sites or to third parties who then forwarded them or published them.
(Copyright © 2006, KTRK-TV)

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