Texas Executes Robert Jennings in Nation’s First Execution of 2019

Texas executed Robert Jennings (pictured) on January 30, 2019 for the 1988 murder of Houston police officer Elston Howard, amid questions as to his eligibility for capital punishment and the constitutionality of his death sentence. Jennings was convicted under a sentencing procedure that the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down shortly before his trial in 1989 because it did not adequately allow jurors to consider evidence supporting a sentence less than death. The jury instructions given in his case to redress that error were also later declared unconstitutional, and 25 Texas death-row prisoners had their death sentences overturned as a result. However, Jennings’s court-appointed trial and appeal lawyers failed to raise the issue in Texas state court and the Texas federal courts refused to consider the issue on the grounds that the state court lawyers had procedurally defaulted the claim. The U.S. Supreme Court later changed federal habeas corpus procedures to permit review if ineffective state-court representation caused the default. But when Jennings’s federal lawyers attempted to raise the issue again, the Texas federal appeals court ruled on January 28 that its prior decision had not been based on procedural default and that it had already rejected the claim. Without comment, the Supreme Court issued an order on January 30 declining to hear Jennings’s case, and he was executed.

In challenging Jennings’s death sentence, his current lawyers also argued that both Jennings’s trial lawyer and his previous appellate attorney provided inadequate representation. Jennings’s trial attorney was defending two death-penalty cases at the same time and did not investigate significant mitigating evidence that included Jennings’s history of brain damage from a car crash and an injury with a baseball bat, an IQ of 65, and intellectual and adaptive deficits associated with his low IQ. Trial counsel also failed to present readily available evidence of Jennings’s impoverished, abusive, and neglectful upbringing: he was born as the result of a rape, and his mother frequently told him she did not want him. His original appeal lawyers also failed to raise these issues. Edward Mallett, one of Jennings’s current lawyers, said, “There has not been an adequate presentation of his circumstances including mental illness and mental limitations.”

U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes took the unusual step earlier in January of asking the state to consider supporting clemency for Jennings, citing the 30-year delay between the crime and the scheduled execution. Jennings’s attorneys argued in his clemency petition that the state had granted clemency last year to a white death-row prisoner with fewer mitigating circumstances. “Denying a commutation truly will demonstrate that race, class, and privilege matter in determining who is executed in Texas,” attorney Randy Schaffer wrote. “This would send a terrible message to the world.”

Two other executions scheduled for January 2019 were not carried out. Elwood Jones’s January 9 execution date was rescheduled for April 21, 2021 by Ohio Governor John Kasich. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed Blaine Milam’s January 15 execution to permit further litigation “[b]ecause of recent changes in the science pertaining to bite mark comparisons and recent changes in the law pertaining to the issue of intellectual disability.”

(Juan A. Lozano and Michael Graczyk, Texas inmate executed for Houston officer’s death, Associated Press, January 30, 2019; Keri Blakinger, Houston cop killer executed in Huntsville, three decades after officer slaying, Houston Chronicle, January 31, 2019.) Read Robert Jennings’s petition for writ of certiorari. See Executions.