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Richard Burr is in private practice in Houston with the firm of Burr & Welch. He has devoted his practice
entirely to death penalty defense work since 1979, first with Southern Prisoners Defense Committee, and
then with the Public Defender’s Office in West Palm Beach, Florida, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the
Texas Resource Center, and finally, his private practice with Mandy Welch.
He has argued two cases in the United States Supreme Court, Ford v. Wainwright, 477 U.S. 399 (1986),
which established the right of incompetent death-sentenced prisoners to be spared from execution, and
Selvage v. Lynaugh, 494 U.S. 108 (1990), a case which set the stage for the relaxation of procedural default
rules for claims under Penry v. Lynaugh.
Dick has testified before U.S. Congressional committees on death penalty legislation on three occasions,
has presented CLE programs on capital and appellate litigation in twenty states and in numerous national
death penalty training conferences, has taught a death penalty seminar at Yale University’s College of Law,
and in 1998 received the Life in the Balance Achievement Award from the National Legal Aid and Defender
Association for the work he has done in capital defense over his career. He served as one of the
attorneys for Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing trial and was the coordinator of the penalty
phase defense for Mr. McVeigh.
He has served as a Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel since October of 1997.
Dick Burr |
