The below bio was taken from The Student Health Coalition Archive Project, at www.studenthealthcoalition.org , contributed by John E. Davis and Jack Beckford:
Richard Burr graduated from law school in 1976 at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
Dick’s legal career quickly moved toward the defense of people in death-penalty cases as a public defender in West Palm Beach, Fla. From 1979 through 1982, he served on the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee, representing condemned clients in capital cases in state and federal appeals.
From 1987 to 1994, Dick served as assistant counsel and director of the Capital Punishment Project for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York. He managed a national docket of up to 30 death-penalty cases and served as a consultant to attorneys and capital-case resource centers in seven states on more than 100 death-penalty cases.
Dick moved to Houston to become litigation director at the Texas Appellate Practice and Education Resource Center, a clearinghouse that secured representation for death row inmates. During his tenure at the Center, he supervised 235 death-penalty cases in post-conviction proceedings and 20 cases in trial and direct-appeal proceedings.
He later left the Center to join the defense team representing Timothy McVeigh, the accused bomber of the Oklahoma City federal building. After McVeigh’s conviction and sentencing, Dick returned to the Resource Center, but the Center died for lack of funding. Dick and his wife, Mandy Welch, also an attorney with long experience defending death row prisoners, established a private practice in Houston, Burr & Welch. They also organized the Texas Defender Service, which carried on the mission of representing death row prisoners.
Dick has testified before U.S. Congressional committees on death penalty legislation on three occasions, has argued two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, has presented Continuing Legal Education programs on capital and appellate litigation in twenty states and in numerous national death penalty training conferences, and has taught a death penalty seminar at Yale University’s College of Law. In 1998, he 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.
As of 2021, he and Mandy live in a small town in east Texas, about 80 miles outside of Houston. Although he has cut back on his travel and national consulting, he has not retired. He still represents a number of clients on death row in Texas.
Click on the link below to read a transcript of an interview conducted with Richard Burr that was published in 2010 by
The Rule of Law Oral History Project
https://www.ccohr.incite.columbia.edu/richard-h-burr
On February 10, 2023, I sat down with Richard Burr in Livingston, Texas to talk with him about his experiences of working as a lawyer, doing death penalty defense work since in 1979, representing many clients across many of the southern states, moreso in Texas and Florida than anywhere else, but also in Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Oklahoma. His work has mostly included post-conviction and habeous representation, but he also did some work as a trial attorney. During that time, 11 of his clients were executed and he witnessed 6 of these executions. As I spoke with Mr. Burr, he shared detailed recollections of his clients who were executed and his experiences as a witness of both electrocutions and lethal injections of these clients.