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

[Rick Halperin]

Jan. 17



TEXAS:

Sharon Keller is Texas' Judge Dread----When Sharon Keller turned off the
clock on a Death Row inmate's last-gasp appeal, she became the most
vilified judge in Texas

Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins says his predecessors were
sometimes unfair to defendants.

Lawyer Brian Wice says Keller is a friend, but even he can't defend her
decision.Take her off the bench and Sharon Keller is funny, smart and
personable, if a little shy. People genuinely like her. One of the most
powerful judges in Texas plays gin every week with a group of Austin
friends and enjoys sharing drinks with lawyers who've just tried to
persuade her of the finer points of their cases.

A former Dallas County prosecutor whose family started a string of popular
hamburger joints, Keller is the presiding judge of the Texas Court of
Criminal Appeals, and right now the same lawyers who are quick to share an
endearing anecdote about the judge will also tell you that she's not fit
to serve on the bench. Keller has skated from one controversy to the next,
but today she finds herself the most vilified judge in Texas, if not the
entire country.

On September 25, Keller refused to keep her clerk's office open an extra
20 minutes to receive a last-gasp pleading from the attorneys for
condemned inmate Michael Richard. Richard's lawyers were having computer
problems that prevented them from turning in their motion on time. The
49-year-old murderer was executed just hours after Keller locked the door.

Richard's pleading was a complicated procedural move that followed a U.S.
Supreme Court decision earlier that morning that raised doubts about the
constitutionality of lethal injection. That gave Richard's lawyers an
opening to stay their client's execution until the Supreme Court revisited
the issue.

But Keller's decision to close her court at 5 p.m.a move that has since
been blasted by even her Republican colleaguesviolated the court's
unwritten policies for handling executions. It also broke sharply from
tradition. In Texas, it's not unusual for judges and clerks to take
last-minute pleadings at their homes. On execution day, the courts don't
have a strict closing time.

Keller's actions also defied the Supreme Court decision from that day,
which has resulted in an unofficial nationwide moratorium on capital
punishment. Maybe she didn't make an intentional end run around the
highest court in the land, but that was the effect. To be more blunt, the
effect was to kill a man months before his execution would have proceeded,
assuming the Supreme Court would have allowed it at all. To date, Richard
is the last U.S. inmate put to death.

A collection of activists have since decried Keller's actions. Protesters
have gathered outside her North Austin mansion carrying clocks set to
5:00. A band called Possumhead, fronted by an Austin lawyer, recorded a
grungy song with the blunt refrain "Sharon is a killer, a really lethal
killer." Meanwhile, a like-minded blog named Sharonkiller.com, already in
operation after some of the judge's past mishaps, includes a series of
fake personal entries: "Maybe I should sell and move back to Dallas and
help out at Dad's hamburger stand before my house becomes a stop on one of
those Duck bus tours of Austin," the fake judge writes. "Tomorrow is
Halloween and I'm going as myself, boo."

While the real Keller has made other baffling decisions and public
statements over the years, her latest actions have stirred an epic
backlash that extends far beyond the protests of anti-death-penalty
activists. She's been mocked in Newsweek, scolded by The Dallas Morning
News and asked to step down by the Houston Chronicle and Texas Monthly.
Powerful, prominent attorneys, including a former head of the State Bar of
Texas, have filed official complaints against her and lambasted the judge
to anyone with a notebook or microphone.

"It's hard to imagine anything she could have done that could have been
worse than this," says Michol O'Connor, a retired appellate judge in
Houston. "I think she should be removed. I wouldn't trust any decision she
could make after this. This is such a fundamental issuethe right to get a
piece of paper in courthow can we trust her on more complicated issues?"

Even lawyers who praise Keller's work ethic and sense of decorum can't
believe she expedited an execution after the Supreme Court clearly gave
condemned inmates across the country one last chance to appeal.

"Sharon is a friend of mine. I think she's a delightful person off the
bench, but from a legal standpoint, the decision to shut the clerk's
office at five when even Ray Charles could have seen that there were
papers coming in to stay this execution was unconscionable," says Houston
defense attorney and Court TV analyst Brian Wice. "From a non-legal
standpoint, it was a knuckleheaded move."

It seems like just about no one these days can defend Keller's actions.
Not even the daughter of Marguerite Dixon, the woman Michael Richard was
convicted of murdering 20 years ago. "It sounded to me like she was just
being arbitrary," says Celeste Dixon. "She had a chance to at least hear
the arguments, and she chose to take her powers as a judge and make a
decision without any thought."

Lost in the demonstrations against Judge Keller is the fact that the man
whose death she hastened was guilty as sin. Her actions spun from a grisly
rape and murder in which there's no doubt who committed the crime.

Marguerite Dixon was a native of West Virginia who missed the changing of
the seasons when she moved to Hockley, 40 miles north of Houston. Although
she could be a stern disciplinarian, her children never doubted she loved
them. They thought of her as a wonderful mother.

On the afternoon of August 18, 1986, Michael Richard, on parole after a
burglary conviction, asked Marguerite's son Albert whether the yellow van
parked outside their house was for sale. Albert told him the vehicle
belonged to his brother and asked Richard to come back another time.

Later that evening, Albert and his sister Paula returned home and quickly
knew something was wrong. The sliding glass door was open. All the lights
were out. It was too early for their mom to have gone to sleep.

Frightened, the Dixons asked a neighbor to walk in the house with a
flashlight and gun. That's when they discovered their mother dead in her
bedroom, shot in the head with a .25-caliber automatic pistol.

It didn't take long for police to find their man. The next morning, the
detective assigned to the case found a missing yellow van and traced it
back to Richard. After obtaining a warrant for his arrest, police found
him at his mother's home. Richard confessed to the crime and led police to
the murder weapon. In September 1987, a Harris County jury found Richard
guilty of capital murder and sentenced him to death.

Richard's execution date would come 20 years later on September 25, 2007.
That morning, two of his lawyers, having exhausted all other legal
remedies, were hoping to convince the U.S. Supreme Court that their client
was mentally retarded and that executing him would be unconstitutional.
Their prospects were bleak, but after years of appeals, Richard's
attorneys had run out of options.

But early that morning, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Baze v. Rees, a
Kentucky case alleging that the use of particular chemicals in a lethal
injection should be banned as cruel and unusual punishment because of the
pain and suffering they might induce in condemned inmates. The Supreme
Court didn't rule one way or another; it merely indicated that the full
court needed to review the constitutionality of lethal injection in the
near future.

David Dow, Richard's lead attorney and a professor at the University of
Houston Law Center, did not expect the Supreme Court to accept the
Kentucky case on the day of his client's execution. He didn't think the
increasingly conservative court would review the case at all. So it caught
him off guard when he read about it in an e-mail at his office at 10:30
a.m.

Already Dow had lost valuable time. Just because the Supreme Court granted
a hearing didn't mean that Richard's execution automatically would be
stayed. The law professor had to figure out how a Kentucky case could be
raised in a Texas court. He spent an hour or so discussing some of the
intricate legal issues with Richard's other attorneys. They figured the
Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the highest criminal court in Texas,
wouldn't grant a stay. The court has long been the most conservative in
the state. But if Richard's lawyers were going to ask the Supreme Court
for relief, they had to show that they had exhausted all their options at
the state level. So the rush was on to write their motion.

As Richard's attorneys were scrambling on behalf of their client,
Marguerite Dixon's children learned that their mother's killer may have
one last chance. Paula Dixon, who was 20 at the time of the murder, had
been counting down the days to the execution. It wasn't that she wanted
Richard to be put to death, but as his execution date approached, she
started to keep track of what she thought were his last days.

"Enough already," Dixon remembers thinking when she heard that Richard's
execution date might not be final. "Either do it or don't, but quit
stringing us along."

At 4 p.m., Richard's lawyers finished writing their pleadings, according
to a detailed account of that day's events in Texas Lawyer magazine. Dow
tried to e-mail the document to another lawyer so she could add a few
attachments. That's when he realized he had lost Internet access.

A paralegal working on the Richard case called a clerk at the Court of
Criminal Appeals and asked for more time. The lawyers didn't think this
would be much of an issue. "There were any number of times when the court
was open late or a judge has received pleadings late," says Maurie Levin,
one of Richard's attorneys.

But this time the clerk told Richard's paralegal the court closed at 5
p.m. At 5:10, with his computer problems resolved, Dow finished his
pleading. He says he figured the court would take it. The paralegal called
the clerk a 2nd time and was told that the court wouldn't accept their
filing. As it turns out, Keller instructed the clerk that the court was
closed, according to her own account in the Austin American-Statesman.
(Keller did not return repeated calls from the Dallas Observer to her
office and home.)

"I got a phone call shortly before five and was told the defendant had
asked us to stay open," Keller told the Statesman. I asked why, and no
reason was given. And I know that that is not what other people have said,
but that's the truth. They did not tell us they had computer failure. And
given the late request, and with no reason given, I just said, 'We close
at five.' I didn't really think of it as a decision so much as a
statement."

Keller's explanation to the Statesman is disingenuous at best. Richard's
pleadings weren't about a misdemeanor DWI. They were an attempt to stay an
execution. She knew that. She also knew that the Supreme Court decision
earlier in the morning opened up an avenue for Richard to stay his
execution.

The judge also knew her own court's policies at the time. They stated that
all communication about an imminent execution should go to the judge
assigned to handle last-minute motions on the case. With Richard, that
would have been Judge Cheryl Johnson. But Johnson, a Republican jurist
whom no one will accuse of being sympathetic to defense lawyers, told the
Statesman that Keller never asked her if she would have reviewed Richard's
pleadings, even though she was ready to work late that evening.

"I was angry. If I'm in charge of an execution, I ought to have known
about those things, and I ought to have been asked whether I was willing
to stay late and accept those filings," Johnson told the paper.

Asked if she would have accepted Richard's brief, she replied, "Sure. I
mean, this is a death case."

People who've worked at the Court of Criminal Appeals will tell you that
on the day of an execution, it's not business as usual. Judges and clerks
are ready for just about everything.

"People turned out the lights and went home on normal days, but on days
when it was apparent that a last-minute pleading was coming in on an
execution, there was no formal closing time," says Richard Wetzel, who
worked as general counsel for the court from 1987 to 2003. "The door might
be locked, but court staff and judges were available to process
last-minute requests."

In fact, the culture of capital punishment is rife with drama until the
moment an inmate is declared dead. A little more than 10 years ago,
executions in Texas were held between midnight and sunrise. Wetzel
remembers pleadings coming in almost at dawn, when it wasn't entirely
clear whether lawyers had beaten the clock.

"I remember when officials at the penitentiary would pull out the almanac
and determine the official time of sunrise," Wetzel says.

After they realized they weren't going to be able to file their pleadings
with the Court of Criminal Appeals, Richard's lawyers hurried to explore
all other ways they could save their client. They asked the governor's
office for a stay of execution and were rejected. They also filed one last
appeal before the Supreme Court. At 7:30 p.m., the Supreme Court denied
Richard's appeal. By 8:23 p.m., he was dead.

Harris County Prosecutor Lynn Hardaway, who handled the state's litigation
on the Richard case, says that Dow, Richard's lead lawyer, can't complain
about how the Court of Criminal Appeals handled the case. Ultimately, it
was the Supreme Court that denied his client a stay of execution.

"He was able to present his motion for a stay of execution with the United
States Supreme Court, and he was denied," Hardaway says. "It wasn't like
no one heard his request."

But Dow says that in his appeal before the Supreme Court, the Texas
Attorney General's Office seized on the fact that he did not file anything
that day with the Court of Criminal Appeals. The attorney general argued
that the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction to hear Richard's appeal
because nothing had been filed in or ruled on by the state's highest
criminal court.

Keller's friends can't come up with an explanation for why she closed the
clerk's office when she did, but they do try to shift some of the blame to
the defense lawyers. Dan Hagood, a Dallas defense attorney who served as
Keller's campaign treasurer when she first ran for the bench in 1994, says
that Dow could have filed a short, handwritten motion to stay Richard's
execution. It never had to come down to a last-minute filing. Hagood adds
that even if the clerk's office was closed, Dow could have simply turned
his motion over to any of the nine appellate justices on the court,
including Keller herself.

"I feel like this is a case where the facts are being bent to blame a
judge instead of a lawyer," Hagood says.

But Dow, who has worked on 75 capital cases, says that such criticism
reflects a lack of understanding of how the court works.

"I could have presented a short 1-page, which would have killed a tree
unnecessarily," Dow says. "These are never granted, not once in the
history of Texas death-penalty law."

Within a year or two, law students across the country will be studying the
legal drama that played out over the last day of Richard's life. Maybe
some professors will conclude that Richard's lawyers, though scrambling to
meet a very literal deadline, could have pursued other measures with the
appellate court once Keller shut the clerk's office down. It could be a
good, intricate lesson on the chaotic nature of death row appeals.

But the consequences of Keller's actions are relatively easy for anyone to
understand: Closing the clerk's office created a procedural roadblock for
the defense that it could not overcome. Had Keller simply kept the clerk's
office open an additional 10 or so minutes to receive Richard's pleading,
even if the Court of Criminal Appeals rejected it, the Supreme Court
likely would have blocked his execution. How does one know that? Two days
later, the Supreme Court stayed the execution of Texas inmate Carlton
Turner after his lawyers raised the question first broached in the
Kentucky lethal-injection case. It was nearly the same claim Richard made,
only Turner was able to convince the Supreme Court justices that he
exhausted his state options.

"Her behavior wasn't just outrageous to the average layperson; it is so
outside the realm of judicial reasonableness," defense lawyer Levin says
of Keller. "In 10 minutes, she made a unilateral decision to deny this man
relief that he was completely entitled to, based on her own attitudes and
moods."

In 1994, Sam Bayless, a San Antonio lawyer and graduate of Highland Park
High School, attended a judicial forum at a hotel in Houston. Bayless was
running for a seat on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and just slipped
into a runoff in the Republican primary against Keller, a well-regarded
Dallas County prosecutor who worked in the district attorney's appellate
division.

When the 41-year-old Keller introduced herself, she told the audience she
would be a "prosecution-oriented judge." That may seem like a throwaway
campaign line, but to a stickler for judicial conduct like Bayless, it was
inexcusable.

"I got to thinking that I guess people don't care much about the criminal
courts, because what would happen if a judge ran for a family court seat
on the platform that 'I am husband-oriented or wife-oriented,'" Bayless
says. "They would be hung out to dry in the press, but here it seemed to
pass without notice."

Keller would go on to beat Bayless in the runoff and take on Democrat
Betty Marshall in the general election. This time Keller smoothed out her
position and went from promising to be a "prosecution-oriented" judge to
simply a "pro-prosecution" judge.

"I guess what pro-prosecution means is seeing legal issues from the
perspective of the state instead of the perspective of the defense," she
told The Dallas Morning News.

Of course, Keller simply could have promised to see things from the
perspective of both the prosecution and the defense, but a pledge of
objectivity doesn't help you in a judicial race. Instead, Keller stuck to
uttering platitudes. Sure enough, Keller easily won election to the
state's highest criminal court.

Since taking the bench, Keller has clearly kept her campaign promise of
being a pro-prosecution judge, often earning derision from defense
attorneys if not her own colleagues. In 1996, she concluded that a
defendant received a fair trial even after evidence surfaced that the man
had been tortured into giving a confession. Both the prosecutor and the
judge in the case called for a new trial, but Keller disagreed, concluding
that although the inmate's rights were violated, it didn't affect the
outcome of the trial. In 2003, Keller voted with the majority to permit
the execution of a condemned inmate whose lawyer suffered from bipolar
disorder and had his law license suspended three times.

But those opinions simply fell under the wide ideological umbrella of
conservative jurisprudenceat least as it's defined in Texasand they didn't
make Keller a legal laughingstock. It was only when she discounted new DNA
evidence that seemed to exonerate a convicted rapist that the mold was
cast: It seemed that Keller wasn't just a conservative judge; she was,
many thought, a terrible one.

In 1986, Roy Criner was arrested for the capital murder of a 16-year-old
girl named Deanna Ogg, who had been found dead on a logging trail in
Montgomery County, just north of Houston. Prosecutors later dropped the
murder charge against Criner after a lack of evidence tying him to her
death, but charged him instead with sexual assault after he allegedly
boasted to friends that he forced Ogg to perform oral sex. Prosecutors
didn't have an airtight case, and it took them nearly four years to bring
Criner to trial. When they did, they had one main piece of evidence: A
blood test that showed that the semen found in the victim could have come
from Criner, although the state of DNA testing at the time couldn't
provide a complete match.

"Is there any scientific evidence that in any way supports the state's
contention?" a prosecuting attorney asked the jury, according to a Houston
Press account of the trial. "Yes, there is."

7 years later, new, more advanced DNA testing proved the prosecutor wrong.
DNA taken from the semen found in Ogg did not match Criner. The
prosecutors got the wrong guy. In 1998, a state judge ordered a new trial
for Criner.

But Keller and a majority of judges on the Court of Criminal Appeals
rejected calls for a new trial. Keller theorized that Criner might have
been wearing a condom. Or maybe he simply failed to ejaculate. Never mind
that the defendant was convicted on the basis that the semen found in the
victim's body was his; Keller spun an entirely different story about how
Criner raped his victim, an explanation that differed from the story that
convinced a jury he was guilty.

"You wanted to laugh and cry at the same time," says Michael Charlton,
Criner's attorney, about Keller's reasoning. "It made no sense, and you
felt like everything you understood about your own profession was turned
upside down."

So Criner, characterized by his attorney as nearly retarded, remained in
prison, wondering if he'd languish behind bars his entire life. His
mother, Jackie, tried as best she could to understand from her son's
lawyers why he couldn't so much as get a new trial, but often she'd simply
leave the room and weep. Her son's lawyers had evidence that refuted the
prosecution's main argument against her son, and they couldn't receive a
new trial.

But the simple logger's saga prompted a nationwide outcry. Syndicated
columnist Clarence Page called on George W. Bush, then governor of Texas,
to pardon Criner.

The PBS program Frontline also covered the case and landed a memorable
interview with Keller. On national television, the judge referred to the
16-year-old victim as a "promiscuous girl," allowing for the possibility
that someone else's semen could have been inside her other than the
rapist's. To Keller, the DNA test simply didn't mean a thing.

"The evidence didn't show that he did not have sex with this woman," she
told Frontline. "It can't. Just like the absence of fingerprints right
here doesn't show that I didn't touch that chair. It can't show that he
didn't do that."

Later in the program, Frontline asked Keller, "How do you prove you're
innocent?"

"I don't know. I don't know," she replied.

Following Keller's appearance on Frontline, Charlton made 50 copies of the
judge's interview and mailed it to the main papers in the state. At the
time, Keller was running to become the presiding judge of the court
against fellow Judge Tom Price, who accused her of turning the Court of
Criminal Appeals into a national joke after the Frontline interview.
Keller would go on to defeat Price, but Charlton kept his client in the
news, which he realized was his best bet for setting him free.

"The slogan we adopted at the time was, If you have an innocence case,
lawyers can't help you, " Charlton says. "Only journalists can."

Of course, it doesn't hurt to have Barry Scheck on your side either. The
former O.J. Simpson lawyer, who has spent a good part of his career
exposing wrongful convictions, joined the Criner defense team shortly
after the first DNA test seemed to exonerate him. Scheck asked for an
inventory of everything that was found at the original crime scene,
including a cigarette butt left near the victim. When the DNA from the
cigarette did not match Criner's, and a new round of publicity about his
case ensued, Bush pardoned him.

Many attorneys talk about landmark cases they won like old men reliving
the night they led their high school team to the conference title. They
become excited and giddy, choreographing each scene of their legal triumph
as though they've reveled in it every day since. But when Charlton
reflects on Criner's case, he turns disconsolate and detached. He may have
helped free an innocent man from a 99-year prison sentence, but there is
no trace of glee in his voice, only a sense of frustration that probably
hasn't ebbed in 7 years.

"It's not an exaggeration to say that I had a crisis of faith in the legal
system and it's one I never got over," Charlton says. "I have no faith in
the legal system. I'm very, very cynical about the legal system even
though I make a good living in it. As far as I'm concerned, I might as
well be a highly paid plumber."

To some of Keller's detractors, the judge honed a one-sided and arbitrary
disposition during her six-year stint as a prosecutor at the Dallas County
District Attorney's Office. There was a time when the office that former
chief prosecutor Henry Wade built was considered a training ground for
bright young lawyers, some of whom would go on to become highly paid
defense attorneys and well-respected judges. But over the last year, the
legacy of Wade and his office has been badly tarnished as Dallas County
has been forced to release more than a dozen innocent prisoners, nearly
all of whom were wrongfully convicted during his tenure

Critics of Wade and his like-minded successorsamong them John Vance, who
hired Kellersay that for more than a generation, the District Attorney's
Office has been overly aggressive, if not flat-out reckless in performing
its duties. The ethical obligation that prosecutors have to seek justice
was a mere academic notionwhat mattered most was dispatching shackled
defendants to jail, even if it took shaky eyewitness accounts to gain a
conviction. Keller's growing legion of naysayers see her as a judge who
never seems to consider that prosecutors sometimes badly erras they did
with Roy Crinerand they blame that on Keller's old employer.

"Certainly the culture of the Dallas County District Attorney's Office
shaped her, formed her and gave her to us," says Jim Harrington, director
of the Texas Civil Rights Project. "The Richard case really reflects her
attitude that she's not really a jurist; she's more interested in moving
people on to convictions and to the death penalty."

Hagood, who knew Keller when she was "the star of the appellate section,"
eagerly defends his longtime friend. "She's an outstanding attorney in
every respect: very bright, conscientious, ethical and focused."

But Craig Watkins, the Dallas County district attorney who has worked to
remedy the mistakes of his predecessors, says that even if Keller was a
good lawyer, she learned some bad lessons along the way. The shadow of
Wade hung over the District Attorney's Office for years, maintaining a
warped legal culture, he says.

"The DAs after Henry Wade were prodigies of Henry Wade, and I don't want
to disparage him, but let's be honest, there were some things that were
done to defendants that were unfair," Watkins says. "This office is a
training ground to prepare lawyers, and obviously you take on the
mentality of this office. I think most lawyers, after they've left for
private practice, understand the past failures of this office and are
honest with it."

Even if Michael Richard's lawyers were able to stay his execution, he
likely would have been put to death eventually. The Supreme Court may rule
soon that the drug cocktails used in a lethal injection, in fact, do not
constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Then executions in Texas and
across the country would resume. Even if the court has problems with the
standard lethal-injection protocol, states could refine it to overcome
those concerns.

So it's not likely that Richard could have avoided his date with death for
another two decades. Criner, though, was an innocent man, and Keller
helped keep him in prison for two additional years after DNA tests cleared
him of the crime. Then she offered a clumsy, embarrassing rationale of her
decision on national television.

Yet the pure simplicity of how Keller turned off the clock before a Death
Row inmate could file an 11th-hour appeal has made her a pariah among
lawyers. Whether her conduct here was worse than before, or whether it hit
the tipping point, Keller really did it this time. She'll probably keep
her seat, but her reputation is beyond repair.

More than 300 lawyers have signed on to official complaints about her
actions to both the State Bar of Texas and the state Commission on
Judicial Conduct. Many of them represent the very heart of a legal
establishment not known for picking fights with high-ranking judges.

"I signed the petition because it was very unsettling to me as a lawyer
that any criminal defendant's life, however unworthy it may be, could be
dealt with in such a cavalier manner," says Broadus Spivey, a former state
Bar president who specializes in legal malpractice. "To a person, everyone
with whom I have discussed this situation agrees with me that it should
have never happened. I have never seen such a unanimous response from the
legal profession."

Dick DeGuerin, the celebrated defense attorney who has represented a spate
of high-profile clients ranging from Tom DeLay to the late David Koresh,
also signed the petition against Keller.

"She has done some outrageous things, but this was the last straw," he
says. "It was so clearly a life-and-death situation."

But the problem is that this probably won't be the last straw. Even in a
state that has locked up more than its share of guiltless defendants,
judges rarely receive any kind of severe sanction. Most lawyers expect
Keller to receive a mere slap on the wrist, if that.

Brian Wice, for one, says that no matter what sitting judges do, they
almost never have to worry about being kicked off the bench.

"When you look at the conduct that will get you sanctioned from the
judicial commission, it's like getting kicked out of a Guns N' Roses
concert," he says, "I think she will survive."

(source: Texas Observer)

**************

Appeals court find death row inmate mentally retarded


The state's top criminal appeals court has reduced a death sentence to
life imprisonment for a death row inmate condemned for murdering a
Houston-area convenience store clerk during a 1995 robbery.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals handed down its ruling Wednesday in
the case of Daniel Plata. The court found that Plata, 32, was mentally
retarded and thus ineligible for the death penalty.

The Texas Defender Service, which handled Plata's appeal, said its client
was the 11th Texas death row inmate to receive a life sentence since 2002.
That's when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a Virginia case that the
execution of mentally retarded inmates was unconstitutionally cruel and
unusual punishment.

Plata was 1 of 4 teenagers charged in the robbery of a Stop-N-Go in
northwest Harris County. The store's security camera showed Plata fatally
shot cashier Murlidhar Mahbubani. Plata pleaded guilty during his capital
murder trial and was sentenced to death.

In December 2006, a Harris County state district judge held a hearing on
whether Plata was mentally retarded. In the end, state District Court
Judge Mark Kent Ellis rejected some methods used by the state expert who
found Plata's intelligence topped the Supreme Court's 70 IQ retardation
standard.

(source: Associated Press)