Texas Courts Rule for Two Death-Row Prisoners on Intellectual Disability, Junk-Science Claims

Two Texas pris­on­ers took steps away from death row as state courts ruled in their favor on issues involv­ing false or faulty sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence and argu­ment. On October 5, 2018, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) grant­ed a stay of exe­cu­tion to Juan Segundo (pic­tured, left), direct­ing a Tarrant County tri­al court to recon­sid­er a claim of intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty that the courts had pre­vi­ous­ly reject­ed based on an uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, unsci­en­tif­ic stan­dard for mea­sur­ing his func­tion­ing. Four days lat­er, an El Paso tri­al judge found that pros­e­cu­tors had ​“pre­sent­ed false and mis­lead­ing evi­dence and argu­ment” con­cern­ing the cause of death of a 19-month-old whom Rigoberto ​“Robert” Avila (pic­tured, right) had been con­vict­ed of killing, and rec­om­mend­ed that the CCA grant Avila a new trial.

Texas had been set to exe­cute Segundo on October 10. Segundo’s lawyers had long argued that he is intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled and there­fore exempt from exe­cu­tion under the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2002 rul­ing in Atkins v. Virginia. However, the Texas courts had dis­missed that claim, rely­ing on a series of non­clin­i­cal fac­tors — some based on the fic­tion­al char­ac­ter Lennie Smalls from Of Mice and Men—to say that Segundo was not intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled under Texas law. In 2017, in the case of Moore v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty deter­mi­na­tions must be ​“informed by the med­ical community’s diag­nos­tic frame­work.” The Court struck down Texas’s approach, call­ing it an ​“out­lier” that cre­at­ed ​“an unac­cept­able risk that per­sons with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty will be exe­cut­ed.” In Segundo’s case, the CCA wrote, “[i]n light of the Moore deci­sion and the facts pre­sent­ed in applicant’s appli­ca­tion, we have deter­mined that applicant’s exe­cu­tion should be stayed pend­ing fur­ther order of this Court.”

The CCA stayed Avila’s January 2014 exe­cu­tion 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. 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. In a pre­pared state­ment, Avila’s lawyers wrote: ​“The new sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence cre­ates a com­pelling case for Mr. Avila’s inno­cence, and a judge has now found that the ver­dict against him rests on false and mis­lead­ing tes­ti­mo­ny. After spend­ing 17 years on death row—and fac­ing four seri­ous exe­cu­tion dates—for a crime he did not com­mit, Mr. Avila is anx­ious to present the reli­able sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence to a jury.”

(Emma Platoff, Judge rec­om­mends new tri­al for Texas death row inmate Rigoberto Avila, Texas Tribune, October 9, 2018; Keri Blakinger, Texas court stays Fort Worth man’s exe­cu­tion over claims of intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty, Houston Chronicle, October 6, 2018.) Read the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals order. See Intellectual Disability and Prosecutorial Misconduct.