WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court docket on Monday rejected an enchantment from a Texas demise row inmate whose bid for a brand new trial drew the help of the prosecutor’s workplace that initially put him on demise row.
The justices left in place a Texas appeals courtroom ruling that upheld the homicide conviction and demise sentence for Areli Escobar, though Escobar’s case is just like that of an Oklahoma man, Richard Glossip, whose homicide conviction the excessive courtroom just lately overturned.
There was no clarification from the justices about why Escobar’s enchantment met a special destiny.
Not like in Glossip’s case, Escobar will not be going through imminent execution.
The Texas Court docket of Legal Appeals has twice rejected Escobar’s appeals. The primary time adopted a decrease courtroom choice ordering a brand new trial after the decide recognized issues with the proof. Extra just lately, the appeals courtroom once more dominated in opposition to Escobar after the Supreme Court docket had ordered it to rethink.
Escobar was convicted and sentenced to demise within the Could 2009 deadly stabbing and sexual assault of Bianca Maldonado, a 17-year-old highschool pupil in Austin. They lived in the identical house advanced.
The main focus of the prosecution case in opposition to Escobar was proof from the Austin Police Division’s DNA lab.
However a later audit turned up issues on the lab that led Choose David Wahlberg of the Travis County District Court docket to conclude that Escobar’s trial was unfair.
“The State’s use of unreliable, false, or deceptive DNA proof to safe (Escobar’s) conviction violated basic ideas of justice,” Wahlberg wrote.
When the case returned to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Travis County prosecutors now not had been defending the conviction. Voters had elected a brand new district lawyer, Jose Garza, who ran on a promise to carry police accountable in Austin, the state capital and county seat.
In Glossip’s case, Oklahoma Lawyer Normal Gentner Drummond backed the decision to throw out the conviction and demise sentence as a result of the invention of latest proof persuaded him Glossip didn’t have a good trial.
The justices agreed, ruling that prosecutors’ choice to permit a key witness to provide testimony they knew to be false violated Glossip’s constitutional proper to a good trial.
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