News Brief — Texas Appeals Court Rejects Recommendation for New Trial for Rigoberto Avila

NEWS (3/​11/​20): The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) has reject­ed the rec­om­men­da­tion of an El Paso County tri­al court that death-row pris­on­er Rigoberto Avila should be grant­ed a new tri­al as a result of the prosecution’s reliance on false and out­dat­ed scientific evidence. 

Avila was sen­tenced to death for the alleged mur­der of a 19-month-old infant based upon what he con­tend­ed was false expert tes­ti­mo­ny that he had abused the child. The TCCA stayed Avila’s exe­cu­tion in January 2014 based on a new law giv­ing pris­on­ers access to the courts to lit­i­gate new evi­dence that their con­vic­tions had been based on false or mis­lead­ing foren­sic evi­dence. His was one of the first cas­es sent back to a low­er court for recon­sid­er­a­tion under the 2013 junk-science law. 

In his 2001 tri­al, pros­e­cu­tors argued that Avila had killed his girlfriend’s infant son. ​“There’s no oth­er way the kid could have died,” they told the jury. New evi­dence showed, how­ev­er, that the infant could have died from injuries caused by his four-year-old broth­er. New evi­dence indi­cat­ed that the child’s fatal injuries were the result of an acci­dent. In an October 9, 2020 rul­ing, Judge Annabell Perez wrote that this new evi­dence ​“prob­a­bly would have led jurors to har­bor rea­son­able doubt about [Avila’s] guilt” if it had been avail­able at trial. 

The Texas appeals court reject­ed the tri­al court’s find­ings in an unsigned opin­ion issued on March 11, 2020. The court wrote that Avila had failed to meet the “’Herculean’ bur­den to prove by clear and con­vinc­ing evi­dence that no rea­son­able juror would have con­vict­ed him based on the new evidence.”