Wedding bells behind bars?

Diane Zamora, the former Navy cadet now serving life for her role in the murder of Adrienne Jones, has petitioned Bexar County for a marriage license. Her potential groom is not her fellow killer David Graham but a soon-to-be-released inmate named Steven Mora. She's never met Mora, of course, but the only real obstacle is the county clerk and an unusual double-proxy ceremony:

The couple's request for a double-proxy wedding is a new one, even for prison officials.

Larry Fitzgerald, a spokesman for the TDJC, could not remember a double-proxy wedding but said, "We have proxy marriages all the time."

Pickax murderer Karla Faye Tucker, a resident of Texas' death row from 1984 to 1998, married Dallas-based prison ministry worker Dana Brown by proxy in 1995. In 1998, she became the first woman executed in Texas since 1863.

Two ceremonies are conducted when proxy marriages take place, Fitzgerald said: A civil ceremony in the free world with a proxy standing in for the inmate, and another ceremony conducted in prison by the prison chaplain, with a proxy standing in for the free spouse.

To conduct a double-proxy wedding, four stand-ins and three ceremonies would probably have to take place, Fitzgerald said: A free-world ceremony with two proxies, and two prison ceremonies with one proxy each.

Attorney General Greg Abbott gave an opinion allowing all this to go forward, but it's still up to the county clerk.

As she isn't eligible for parole until 2036, it's hard to imagine this actually lasting. But stranger things have happened, I guess.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on March 13, 2003 to Crime and Punishment | TrackBack