Nov. 3
TEXAS:
(Not) So Easy to Kill ---- The nation's executioners march toward 1,000
deaths - and Texas leads the parade. ---- Life for death row inmates ends
here - unless an 'innocence project' springs them.
Eric Randall Nance: No 1,000?
Luis Ramirez: Executed Oct. 20, 2005.
Jaime Elizalde Jr.: Set for execution today.
Harris County District Attorney Charles Rosenthal stakes his job on the
death penalty.
Levy: 'It's a necessity, like an operation.'
By the time Charlie Brooks Jr. lay strapped on the gurney waiting for
death, most everyone who read or listened to any news was familiar with
the rough outline of his life and crime. Not only was Brooks the 1st
person scheduled to be put to death in Texas since the U.S. Supreme Court
sent the nation's executioners back to work in 1976, he was also the 1st
African-American prisoner to enter a modern-day execution chamber and,
most significantly, the 1st person in the United States to be executed by
lethal injection.
The news media gorged on his case, particularly in North Texas, where
Brooks, who grew up in Fort Worth, committed the crime that sent him to
death row - the murder of auto mechanic David Gregory. As his execution
drew near, journalists set up shop in a Fort Worth judge's office, where
word of a last-minute stay might arrive, staked out the homes of the
families involved, and sifted through the crowd of demonstrators outside
the death house in Huntsville. The execution at 12:16 a.m. on Dec. 7,
1982, made the front pages of newspapers not only in Texas but across the
nation and around the world. Brooks had become simultaneously an icon for
a new era of "humane" executions and a symbol for a return to barbarism.
Last month, as the state of Texas conducted its most recent execution, the
picture could hardly have been more different. The name of Luis Ramirez
was barely known beyond his family and the family of his victim, West
Texas firefighter Nemecio Nandin, who was murdered in 1998. Bob Ray
Sanders wrote a column about Ramirez in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram the
day before Ramirez' execution. Most news media, if they mentioned the case
at all, did little more than the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, which carried
a 3-paragraph blurb from the Associated Press announcing that yet another
convicted killer had been put to death.
Barring the unexpected, in the next few weeks or months the United States
will execute the 1,000th condemned prisoner in the modern era of capital
punishment. The passage of that grim milestone may draw some news
coverage, but by and large, 989 executions later, it's clear that the
death penalty has become routine here. Since Gary Gilmore, the 1st person
to be executed in the modern era, told Utah executioners "Let's do it,"
and fell dead before a firing squad, the nation has executed an average of
35 persons a year, 3 a month, 1 every 10 days for each of the last 28
years.
"The more you execute people, the easier it becomes to execute more
people," said David Dow, a University of Houston law professor who has
represented about 50 death row inmates on appeal.
The pace and order of executions around the nation adjust daily as
appellate courts issue last-minute stays and judges set fresh execution
dates. During the next 3 months, 19 men from 8 states are expected to be
put to death. Right now, a convicted killer from Arkansas, Eric Randall
Nance, appears most likely to attain the distinction of becoming the
1,000th prisoner to be executed, but last-minute delays ordered by courts
or governors could easily put a Texan in his place.
In fact, almost 1/2 of the 19 expected to die are on Texas death row. No
state has sent more men and women to the death house than Texas. More than
1/3 of the nation's executions - 352, if a lethal injection of a Houston
man scheduled for today goes through - have taken place in Texas.
Virginia, the next closest state, has executed 94 persons. California has
648 death row inmates, the only state to outstrip Texas' current roster of
414 - but in 3 decades has executed just 11.
In fact, Californias experience may be more indicative of whats happening
around the country than our own state's. Ironically, as executions have
become more and more routine, death sentences have also become
increasingly difficult for prosecutors to obtain. World opinion has turned
further and more decidedly away from the death penalty, a fact which has
been noted in some key U.S. court decisions. Several years ago, news
stories documenting shoddy legal work in death row cases in many states -
particularly in Texas - raised questions in the public mind about the
system of providing inmates with attorneys. And the efforts of prisoner
advocates, death penalty foes, and college-age researchers have produced a
growing list of once-condemned prisoners who have been cleared of the
charges that had sent them to death row.
Still, "The machine keeps cranking them out with relatively little
notice," said Dennis Longmire, a criminal justice professor at Sam Houston
State University in Huntsville, the Piney Woods town that is also home to
the Texas death chamber. "A thousand bodies lie in complete darkness in
most of our world's and in most Americans' consciousness. Most people dont
ever think about. Most people don't want to think about it."
Although the death penalty is, so to speak, alive and well in this
country, it appears to be slowing down. According to the national Death
Penalty Information Center, fewer people are being sentenced to death than
at any time since Gilmore was executed on Jan. 17, 1977. In 2004, the
center estimates, American juries condemned just 125 people - less than
1/2 of the 320 in the record year of 1996 - and 8 fewer than the 137
people condemned in 1977.
Death sentences are getting harder to obtain, attorneys say, because of
better training for defense lawyers, changes in sentencing law, a
declining crime rate, and shifting public opinion about crime and
punishment itself. Professional development programs for lawyers, death
penalty clinics, and changes in defense strategies, particularly during
the last decade, have translated into more juries opting for life
sentences instead of death.
"We're appointing better lawyers across the country, especially in Texas,"
said Dow, the Houston law professor who runs the Texas Innocence Network,
one of a growing number of "innocence projects" around the country that
investigate wrongful conviction claims. Court-appointed attorneys in
capital cases, Dow said, are more likely than their predecessors to
conduct thorough investigations of their own - not only of the crimes but
also of their clients' backgrounds. While the backgrounds of accused
persons might have little to do with their guilt, they can play enormous
roles in the punishment phase of trials, when so-called mitigating
evidence tips the scale to life or death.
In the early years, attorneys appointed to represent accused killers were
sometimes ill prepared and poorly equipped. News account about sleeping,
slipshod, or alcoholic lawyers in a handful of cases left lingering
questions about whether the courts were capable of making the right
decisions in the cases with the highest stakes.
Public attitudes about crime and punishment in general have changed as the
nations violent crime rate has plunged over the last 3 decades. In 1976,
the year in which the death penalty was reinstated, there were 48 violent
crimes for every 1,000 people in the United States. The crime rate peaked
5 years later, with 52 violent crimes per 1,000 people, and hovered in the
40 to 50 range until the late 1990s, when it began to fall. By 2004,
according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, the rate had been cut
in 1/2 - to 21 violent crimes per 1,000 population.
"People were really angry about the crime situation in this country in the
1980s," recalled Alan Levy, head of the criminal division of the Tarrant
County District Attorney's office. "There was a perception that the crime
situation was out of control, that the parole situation was out of
control."
In Texas, once a person is convicted of capital murder, a jury can return
one of only two sentences - death, or life in prison. But prison
overcrowding and a weak parole system often meant that criminals sentenced
to life behind bars were returned to the streets after serving only a
fraction of their sentence; the law at that time didn't allow sentences
with no possibility of parole. Levy said some people were released after
serving as little as seven years: "That was not uncommon."
Juries reacted to that, Dow agreed. "In the mid- to late 1980s and early
1990s, juries in death penalty trials thought that if they didnt sentence
a defendant to death, he might get out in a few years and hurt or kill
someone else."
Such public concern led to changes in the law requiring prisoners
sentenced to life to remain incarcerated for longer and longer periods of
time, until a life sentence came to mean at least 40 years in prison. The
Texas Legislature earlier this year changed the law yet again to make a
life sentence in a capital case just that - life without the possibility
of parole. As the floor on a life sentence has risen, some jurors who
might have once voted for death now see life without parole as a viable
alternative, Levy said.
The courts also have reduced the pool of potential offenders who legally
can be sentenced to die. In 2002, the Supreme Court banned the execution
of mentally retarded people, saying "a national consensus has developed
against it."
Almost 20 states already had banned the practice, the court said. In the
remaining states, executions of mentally retarded people had become
increasingly rare. Attorneys say that ruling might eventually spare the
lives of 40 to 50 death row inmates who are believed to be mentally
retarded.
Strangely, the ruling has yet to have much impact on the prisoner whose
case led to the landmark ruling: Daryl Renard Atkins, born the same year
that Gilmore was executed. Now 27, Atkins was convicted in Virginia in
1996 for the murder of a 21-year-old airman, Eric Nesbitt. After the
Supreme Court overturned his case, however, lower courts resentenced him
to death. Even the courts, it seems, cant decide whether he's retarded. He
is now scheduled for execution on Dec. 2, but many expect the courts to
again delay carrying out that sentence.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court also banned the execution of
prisoners who had been sentenced to death as juveniles, noting that the
United States is "alone in a world that has turned its face against" such
death sentences. That ruling, lawyers believe, voided the death sentences
of more than 70 youthful prisoners.
Both rulings turned on what lawyers call the "diminished capacity" of
mentally retarded people and juveniles to make clear distinctions between
right and wrong and to understand the consequences of their actions. Those
rulings also laid the groundwork for a movement now under way to ban the
execution of a much larger group of prisoners - those with perhaps equally
diminished abilities due to severe mental illness.
A proposal from an American Bar Association task force to ban the
execution of mentally ill people has been embraced by the American
Psychological Association, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and
the American Psychiatric Association. If the proposal, which is vigorously
opposed by many prosecutors, becomes law, it could overturn sentences for
several hundred condemned prisoners.
"If you say it's cruel and unusual to execute the mentally retarded
because they can't perform on an adult level," and then make a similar
rule on similar grounds regarding minors, "it makes sense to extend that
to mental illness," said Bill Harris, a Fort Worth criminal defense
attorney who has represented several mentally ill prisoners who have been
executed. "If it [their mental illness] impairs their ability to make
those kinds of moral judgments, they should also be, logically, exempt."
Prosecutors say that people who are so mentally ill that they cannot
distinguish right from wrong already have protection under law - they
would most likely be found not guilty by reason of insanity. Extending
additional protections would make a mockery of the entire system, they
believe.
"The vast majority of people on death row suffer from a mental disorder of
some kind," said Joshua Marquis, an Oregon prosecutor who is also chairman
of the National Association of District Attorneys capital litigation
committee. "If you define it that way, nobody would ever be given the
death penalty. It creates a standard that would effectively exempt
anyone."
And even some death row lawyers wonder how such a change might be
implemented. "With juveniles, you are either 18 or youre not," said Gary
Hart, an Austin lawyer who represented Kelsey Patterson, a mentally ill
prisoner executed in 2004. "With mental retardation, there is at least
some agreement about what constitutes mental retardation. With mental
illness, you've got such a wide spectrum, everything from depression to
bipolar to post-traumatic stress syndrome to paranoid schizophrenia. Its a
much more difficult thing to know where and how to draw that line."
Changes that exempt certain groups of people from capital punishment are
what Longmire, the criminal justice professor, calls "legal smart bombs" -
technical fixes that address narrow issues while leaving the execution
apparatus itself intact. Others say that exemptions for the young and the
mentally impaired actually work to the benefit of death penalty advocates.
"Perversely, those sorts of decisions strengthen the death penalty," said
Dow. "They shrink the universe of people who can be executed, and at the
same time they tend to imply that the rest of the death penalty is OK."
Even so, opponents of the death penalty seem to making headway with public
opinion on some fronts. Levy said prosecutors in his office are
encountering prospective jurors who are "absolutely convinced that
innocent people are being executed" and people who worry that they might
"wake up in the middle of the night and find out theyve sentenced an
innocent man to death row."
Dow isn't surprised to hear it. "The public has become increasingly aware
of the fact that the criminal justice system makes mistakes and that there
are innocent people on death row, that there may have been innocent people
executed," he said. "That all of these perceptions are present throughout
society means theyre also present on death penalty juries." And jurors who
believe that innocent people have been condemned are less likely to vote
to send another person to death row.
Such perceptions are fueled in part by the growing number of cases in
which death row inmates have been released from prison and acquitted,
pardoned, or had changes against them dropped. Universities around the
country have established innocence projects in which college students,
working under the supervision of an instructor, reinvestigate death cases
- and sometime walk death row prisoners into freedom, adding yet more
names to the list of wrongly convicted prisoners. An "innocence list"
maintained by the Death Penalty Information Center contains more than a
hundred cases, including 8 in Texas, in which condemned prisoners have
been freed.
The individual cases aren't always clear-cut. Sometimes a prisoner is
released after having his or her conviction reversed on appeal, and
prosecutors choose not to conduct a new trial because witnesses have died.
Other cases are reversed on technical grounds that dont address
culpability.
"There's a big difference between a mistake in a case and whether a
persons guilty or not," said Levy.
Other cases on such lists leave less room for doubt. Ernest Ray Willis,
whose case was reported by Fort Worth Weekly last year ("Free at Last,"
Oct. 27, 2004) is the most recent person added to the "death row
survivors" list from Texas. Willis, now 60 and married to the sister of a
man who was executed while Willis was on death row, spent 17 years behind
bars for an arson that killed 2 women in their mid-20s, Betsy Belue and
Gail Allison, in the tiny West Texas town of Iraan in 1986. After his
conviction, however, his appellate team, led by New York attorney James
Blank, uncovered evidence that Willis had been involuntary drugged during
his trial, that favorable evidence had been withheld from his trial
lawyers, and that another death row inmate, David Martin Long, who was
executed in 1989 for a triple murder, had confessed to setting the fire
that killed the 2 women.
Like much about the death penalty, even cases like Willis' are subject to
multiple interpretations. Abolitionists see them as evidence that the
system makes bad decisions. Death penalty proponents see them as evidence
that the elaborate appellate court system eventually catches any mistakes
made by police or prosecutors.
Partly in response to such interpretations, death penalty foes have
continued to research the cases of executed prisoners, hoping to be able
to one day prove that an innocent person has been put to death - and that
the system therefore can't be trusted to work to protect all those who are
wrongly prosecuted.
One of the most persuasive, but still disputed, claims that an executioner
killed the wrong man comes from Missouri, where the NAACP found enough
evidence to persuade prosecutors to reopen an investigation into the case
against Larry Griffin, who was executed in 1995 for the 1980 drive-by
shooting of Quintin Moss. The civil rights group last summer revealed that
another man who was wounded in the same incident not only saw the shooters
but personally knew Griffin and said that Griffin was not involved. The
organization also developed evidence that raised questions about whether
the states main eyewitness was even at the scene of the crime when it
happened.
Such cases, no matter how compelling, remain hard to sell to the public
without ironclad proof. "What you need is a DNA case," Dow said. "The
public trusts DNA in a way it doesn't trust anything else. When you have
that, you have the gold standard. If you don't have DNA, there is always
some doubt."
But finding a case in which DNA can demonstrate that an innocent person
has been executed has proved elusive - in part because many of the older
capital cases predate the early 1990s when the era of DNA testing began.
"The problem with trying to demonstrate the innocence of anyone before
1992 or 1993 is there was never biological evidence collected that could
have demonstrated someone was innocent," Dow explained.
Harris County District Attorney Charles Rosenthal presides over an office
that has sent more people to death row than any other county in Texas.
Since executions resumed, 82 of the 280 persons that Harris County has
sent to death row have actually been executed. That's more executions and
more death sentences than the combined totals from Dallas, Bexar, and
Tarrant counties.
"One of the things most people dont appreciate is how many folks actually
look at these cases," Rosenthal said. By the time a prisoner is executed
in Texas, the case has been examined by police, prosecutors, a grand jury,
a trial jury and judge, state appellate court judges, federal district
judges, federal appellate court judges, the governor's staff, and often
the U.S. Supreme Court. "If you take the time to add all those people up,
it's a staggering number," he said.
With so many people reviewing every death row case, Rosenthal said, he
doesnt believe an innocent person could be executed in Texas - and that he
probably would resign if such a miscarriage of justice took place on his
watch. "I'd feel horrible, probably worse that that; it would probably
bring me to the point of resignation if we convicted someone who was
innocent," he said.
As a defense attorney in Denton, Alan Levy once represented a man accused
of killing a Texas Ranger and persuaded a jury to sentence the man to life
in prison instead of death. In his subsequent career as a Tarrant County
prosecutor, Levy has tried 10 or so capital murder cases and obtained
death sentences in about 7. Most of those sentenced have been executed.
Levy doesnt have instant recall of those cases - he isn't the sort of
person to notch his gun with such convictions, and hes bothered by the
eagerness of some young prosecutors to take on a capital trial.
"When a prosecutor comes up to me and says, 'I want a death penalty case,'
it reflects a certain amount of immaturity," he said. Levy said he has no
"moral qualms" about the death penalty, comparing it to a surgical
procedure a person may need but doesn't want. "It's something that has to
be done, something that we should do. It's a necessity, like an
operation." But he sometimes wonders whether all those executions have
been worth the expense, the controversy, and the time. "It's a pretty
clumsy mechanism," he said. When the penalty isn't paid until "8 or 10 or
15 years later, it's difficult to think of it being very useful."
If the execution scheduled for today - Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2005 - is
carried out, Texas will have executed its 352nd prisoner since the 1st
lethal injection in 1982. Jaime Elizalde Jr., convicted in the 1994 double
murder of Juan Saenz Guajardo and Marco Sanchez Vasquez outside a Houston
lounge, will become No. 990 on the national list of those put to death.
And others from Texas, the Carolinas, Delaware, Ohio. Arkansas, and
Virginia will fall soon enough.
"By the time youve done it 200, or 250, or 300 times," Dow said, "it's
like brushing your teeth in the morning."
(source: Fort Worth Weekly, Nov. 2)
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Confessed killer of 9-year-old set to die
Condemned killer Melvin Wayne White doesn't want to die but figures the
state is doing him a favor if he's executed tonight.
"I look at it as relief, just to get out of here," White, 55, said last
week from a tiny cage in the visiting area of death row, where he was sent
for the 1997 abduction, sexual assault and fatal beating of a 9-year-old
West Texas girl. "I've got to live with this for the rest of my life. It's
not an easy deal to do.
"If they put me to death, it's going to be the easy way out. The hard way
would be to have me live here with that."
White blamed a drinking problem that started when he was a young teenager
for the slaying of Jennifer Gravell, who lived in his neighborhood in
Ozona, about 200 miles west of San Antonio.
"I messed up, that's all there is to it," he said.
White's scheduled lethal injection would be the 16th this year in Texas
and the 1st of 4 set for over the next 2 weeks in the nation's busiest
death chamber.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, in a pair of 6-0 votes Tuesday,
denied requests that his execution be put off for 90 days and that his
death sentence be commuted to life. The U.S. Supreme Court last month
refused to review his case, although lawyers had before the high court an
appeal that challenged the procedures barring them from filing a suit
related to the constitutionality of the drugs used in the injection by
authorities.
David Dow, a University of Houston law professor involved in the appeal,
described his chances of success at "somewhere between zero and less than
zero %."
"The way I look at it, I hope for the best and expect the worst," White
said. "That way you're not disappointed. But in my frame of mind, if it
goes through, I'm ready for it."
Ori White, the district attorney in Crockett County who prosecuted the
case, called the murder a heinous crime.
"Melvin White deserves the death penalty, absolutely," Ori White said.
Melvin White, who lived two houses from the girl's family, attended a
neighborhood barbecue the evening of Aug. 7, 1997, and went home after
downing several drinks. Testimony at his trial indicated the girl showed
up at his house after another neighbor declined her request to go for a
ride.
White took her in his pickup to a roadside rest area outside Ozona where
the girl was bound with black electrical tape, had a sock stuffed into her
mouth and was sexually assaulted with a screwdriver. Then she was hit
repeatedly with a tire iron before her body was dumped behind a water
tank.
Authorities later found in a trash can in White's house the girl's
underpants, sandals and a ball of tape with her hair on it. White
confessed to a Texas Ranger and told where the body could be found. A
witness had told authorities, after the girl was reported missing, that he
saw White in his truck with what he believed was a blond person. The
victim had blond hair.
"I don't remember much about it because I was drinking," White said.
White, who grew up in Big Lake, about 70 miles west of San Angelo, had
lived in Ozona since the early 1970s and worked at a gas plant. The day of
the slaying he'd been drinking all day.
"I always bought vodka in half gallons," he said. "I'd drink one of those
every three days, and that doesn't count when I'd go to the bar. I'd done
some serious drinking. ... At the rate I was drinking, if I hadn't come to
prison, I'd probably killed myself, drink myself to death."
White said he succumbed to peer pressure and began drinking as early as
age 13 or 14.
But prosecutor Ori White told jurors at the trial the alcohol explanation
was a convenient excuse to cover up Melvin White's history as a pedophile.
Testimony showed White had assaulted an underage daughter, forced her to
perform oral sex, raped her and offered to pay her $50 a week to perform
sexual favors.
Next on the execution schedule is inmate Charles Thacker, facing injection
Nov. 9 for strangling a Houston woman while attempting to rape her. 2 more
Texas inmates are set to die the following week, another in December and 5
have execution dates for early next year.
(source: Associated Press)
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Beaumont man charged in officer's death
A 19-year-old Beaumont man was formally charged Wednesday with capital
murder in the shooting death of a Houston police officer, said Houston
police spokesman Alvin Wright.
Brandon R. Zachary, 19, has been in police custody since Monday in
connection with last week's death of off-duty police officer Reuben De
Leon.
Zachary was booked into the Harris County Jail without bond.
De Leon was shot and killed at a northwest Houston apartment complex about
3 a.m. Oct. 26. He and another off-duty police officer had just entered a
security apartment used by police officers on duty.
Last week, the Houston Chronicle reported the motive for the shooting as
retaliation. However, another motive emerged in the media this week - a
robbery gone bad.
Police have not confirmed either theory.
The other officer in the apartment said she heard De Leon struggle with
his assailant before he was shot several times. Houston police said the
fact that police used the apartment was widely known.
Initially, Houston homicide detectives were looking for 2 people in
connection with the shooting.
Over the weekend, Beaumont homicide detectives began searching for Zachary
at the home of several relatives after he was identified as a person of
interest.
On Monday, he turned himself in at Jefferson County Jail and subsequently
was questioned by local detectives and Houston officers.
Zachary later was taken to Houston, where Houston homicide detectives
continued the questioning.
On Tuesday, Houston police picked up an unidentified man in Wichita Falls
in connection with the case. He remained in police custody Wednesday; no
charges had been filed.
Zachary is scheduled to have his 1st court appearance this morning.
De Leon, a decorated Marine who joined the department in 1999, was
described by colleagues as an ideal officer. He leaves a wife and 4
children.
The last Houston police officer killed in the line of duty was Officer
Charles Clark who died in April 2003.
(source: The Beaumont Enterprise)
***********************
Severe abuse alleged in baby's death----Mother charged with capital murder
after 1-year-old dies of shaken baby syndrome
A Brownsville couple is charged with capital murder in the death of a
1-year-old boy who authorities say was the victim of "torture."
Court records show that Angel Moreno was taken to the pediatric intensive
care unit of Valley Baptist Medical Center in Harlingen on Monday,
suffering from numerous internal and chronic injuries as a result of
ongoing acts of abuse, known as shaken baby syndrome.
The boys mother Acela Rosalba Moreno, 25, and her boyfriend Manuel Velez,
40, were arrested late Monday and charged with 1st-degree felony injury to
a child.
Authorities added capital murder charges against the couple Wednesday when
Angel died shortly after being removed from life support at 11:04 a.m. It
was the day after his 1st birthday.
Under state law, capital murder is punishable by life in prison or death.
During their Wednesday evening arraignment, Cameron County Magistrate
Judge Patricia Hernandez denied bond for Moreno and Velez, deeming them a
"flight risk," with a "lack of ties to the community" and individual
criminal histories.
According to a probable cause affidavit, Moreno burned the child once with
a cigarette while Velez had burned him with cigarettes repeatedly in
addition to biting him numerous times and shaking him violently.
Velez told investigators that he shook the boy so violently Monday, the
infant stopped breathing.
Cameron County Sheriff Omar Lucio said the entire community has suffered
as a result of acts of abuse he described as "inhumane."
"These people are sadists," Lucio said of the couple. "They inflict pain
and are people who have no hearts. How could they do this to a defenseless
baby?"
The district attorney said their evaluation could take up to 30 days.
Doctors told deputy investigators that Mondays act of abuse left Angel
brain dead and unable to breathe or function on his own.
Physicians declared the boy legally dead at 9:55 a.m. Wednesday and
disconnected his life support at 11:04 a.m. Cameron County Precinct 5-1
Justice of the Peace Sallie Gonzalez has ordered an autopsy.
Lucio said Child Protective Services has custody of Angel's 3 brothers and
sisters who range in age from 2 to 4.
"Maybe they are too small to understand what happened to their little
brother, but CPS or counselors will explain what happened to them," the
sheriff said. "Maybe they will tell them that he went to heaven or
something like that."
District Attorney Armando Villalobos said his office is evaluating the
case to determine if they can seek the death penalty against Moreno and
Velez.
"Anytime a human being is tortured like that, the persons responsible need
to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," he said.
In order to ask for the death penalty, Villalobos said he must evaluate
the couples criminal history and risk to the community.
Court records show that Moreno is a native of Matamoros and that she was
previously deported as an undocumented immigrant.
"It would take her 5 minutes to cross into Mexico and become out of our
reach forever," Assistant District Attorney Rebecca RuBane told Hernandez
during the couple's arraignment.
Court records show that Velez had prior convictions and arrests for
possession of marijuana, terroristic threats, misdemeanor assault, DWI and
hot checks.
Vice Consul Hector Aguilar Meza with the Mexican Consulate of Brownsville
confirmed that Moreno was a Mexican citizen. Aguilar said his office has
already been in touch with the woman but added that it was too early at
press time Wednesday to determine how the consulate would assist in her
defense.
(source: Brownsville Herald)
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Court upholds death penalty for convicted Gregg County man
The state's highest criminal court on Wednesday upheld the conviction and
death penalty of Mario Swain, who police said confessed to killing a
Longview woman and took police to the body.
A Gregg County jury returned a guilty verdict against Swain in the death
of Lola Nixon, whose body was found in a remote location in Gregg County.
Swain challenged the admission of his confession, the indictment and the
jury's death sentence. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, however,
rejected his appeal, citing that although Swain had no prior criminal
convictions and was a "model prisoner" while incarcerated awaiting trial,
prosecutors presented evidence during the punishment phase that Swain had
attacked several other women in the years before Nixon's murder, according
to court documents.
"Both the facts of the instant offense and the other evidence showing
appellant's escalating pattern of violence support a finding of future
dangerousness," stated Appeals Justice Lawrence E. Meyers in his opinion.
"I am gratified by the decision of the Court in this case," Gregg County
District Attorney Bill Jennings stated in a prepared statement. "Today, we
are an important step closer to carrying out the decision of the Gregg
County jury."
(source: Longview News-Journal)
