Father And Victim Kent Whitaker Calls For Son Thomas Whitaker To Be Spared Death Penalty

Texas death row inmate Thomas Whitaker’s father, Kent Whitaker, is pleading for his son to not face the death penalty on Feb. 22 for arranging the murder of Kent Whitaker’s wife and other son in 2003.

Thomas Whitaker took his family out to dinner and let a friend into the house to murder them. Kent Whitaker himself almost didn’t survive. Thomas was motivated by his dad’s $1 million insurance policy. 

Thomas was a suspect for several months after the attack, during which he lived with Kent. Thomas was convicted of orchestrating the murders in 2007, and a jury sentenced him to death.

Kent is now calling on the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles for clemency for his son after already trying and failing to have the prosecution advocate for a life sentence instead of the death penalty, citing his Christian faith.

“We’re not asking them to set him free,” Kent told My Statesman. “We’re not asking them to forgive him. I mean, that’s not their business, but what we are asking them to do is to correct a legal overstep that never should’ve happened in the first place.”

In a petition for the board to resentence his son to life in prison, which was published in the Austin American-Statesman, Kent called on the board to make a moral decision in light of the suffering and grief he would suffer further if Thomas were to face the death penalty.

“There is only one person on Earth who is intimate with the murderous attack, the lives and deaths of the other victims, and the life of Thomas Whitaker — Mr. Whitaker’s father, Kent,” the petition read. “Kent was there. He speaks to clemency with a moral force and detail of experience that no district attorney or judge or anyone else can possess. For the rest of us, the case against commutation to a life sentence seems clear. We can’t forgive; we have no sympathy. But clemency is not about something so simple as sympathy or as formidable as forgiveness. Clemency is about lenity, and it is a moral question rendered far more complex by the unique circumstances of this case.”

The petition also said there is no advocate for Thomas’s execution.

“No one close to the people involved in this case want it to happen,” the petition reads. “Some passionately oppose it. Other simply wish their lives could be restored to the time before the crime. It is only the State of Texas, through its employees and representatives, that mechanically marches forward onto the date of death.”

The petition also included multiple letters from Thomas’s fellow inmates, some of whom said they were thankful to meet him, that he had worked the hardest out of other inmates on the farm to rehabilitate himself and that he inspired inmates to become better people.