[Deathpenalty] death penalty news------TEXAS

[Rick Halperin]

Jan. 10



TEXAS----execution

Execution for convicted killer of Georgetown boy


Death row inmate Carlos Granados was executed Wednesday night over the
1998 stabbing death of a Georgetown boy in a domestic dispute.

The victim, Anthony Jiminez, was the 3-year-old son of a woman Granados
was dating.

He stabbed the boy at an apartment complex in Georgetown after getting
into an argument and stabbing his girlfriend Katherine Jimenez.

Granados was convicted of using a large kitchen knife to kill Anthony
Jiminez during a stabbing frenzy that left the child's mother, Katherine,
with more than 20 knife wounds. She survived the 1998 attack at her
apartment in Georgetown, just north of Austin. She testified against
Granados at his capital murder trial and planned to attend his lethal
injection.

"With everything coming up and all the emotions, the varied emotions,
sometimes you try to put things away, especially the hurtful things  the
screams, the last moments," she said. "And right now, all of it has come
up again and it's brought a lot of those emotions back  the anger, the
why, the what-if."

The U.S. Supreme Court last month refused to review Granados' case.
Lawyers this week went to the state courts, arguing Granados had poor
legal help from a state-appointed attorney who filed only a meager 2-page
appeal in the critical early stage of his appeals.

"Mr. Granados never received even the pretense of a meaningful state court
review of his conviction or sentence," his lawyers said in a request that
sought a reprieve from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. The court late
Wednesday morning rejected the appeal.

Prosecutors said Granados had excellent legal help, but the evidence
against the Manhattan native was strong, especially with the victim's
mother testifying.

"There's certainly no question of guilt in this particular case," said
John Bradley, the Williamson County district attorney.

Jiminez's relatives called police after she failed to drop off her son at
her grandmother's house and report for work. Officers who went to her
apartment found it locked from the inside and summoned firefighters to
break it open.

Inside, authorities found Granados, his wrists slashed, holding a bloody
knife and urging them to "Shoot me, just shoot me." The child was dead and
his mother near death.

Jiminez, who has remarried and now has 2 small children, said she willed
herself to keep living.

"I'm going to survive so this person doesn't get away with this, and
really for the sake of my son," she said in an interview this week. "I
knew he wasn't alive."

Testimony showed the stabbings were the result of an escalating argument
after Granados refused his girlfriend's order to leave. The pair had dated
before she married and had Anthony. When her marriage ended, they began
seeing each other again and he moved from New York to Texas to be with
her.

At his trial, prosecutors showed Granados, who had no previous prison
record, did have a history of violence, including assaulting a former
girlfriend, biting and bruising a 3-year-old boy, and assaulting a
relative with a beer bottle.

Granados becomes the 1st condemned inmate to be put to death this year in
Texas, and the 380th overall since the state resumed capital punishment on
Dec. 7, 1982. Granados becomes the 141st condemned inmate to be put to
death in Texas sicne Rick Perry became governor in 2001.

Texas put 24 convicted killers to death last year; the state is set to
carry out 4 more executions this month. Scheduled for execution next in
Texas is Johnathan Moore, 32, set to die Jan. 17 for the 1995 fatal
shooting of Fabian Dominguez, a San Antonio police officer.

Granados becomes the 2nd condemned inmate to be put to death this year in
the USA and the 1059th overall since the nation resumed executions on
January 17, 1977.

(sources: Associated Press & Rick Halperin)