The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruling in Ex Parte Briseno is available in Adobe .pdf format.
"Condemned Texas man wins new punishment trial," is the title of the AP report by Michael Graczyk via the Dallas Morning News.
Earlier coverage of the case begins with this post.The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Wednesday threw out the death sentence of a man condemned for fatally shooting a South Texas sheriff nearly 20 years ago.
The court ruled jurors who decided Jose Briseno should be put to death didn't have enough information in their instructions from the trial judge to make their decision. At the time of Briseno's 1992 trial, the rules regarding instructions for capital murder juries were evolving to comply with U.S. Supreme Court decisions.
His appeals attorneys said the jury didn't receive proper instructions about how to consider mitigating evidence of Briseno's unstable family, troubled background, limited intellectual ability and poverty.
The case now returns to the court in Laredo where Briseno was convicted for a new punishment trial.
Briseno, now 53, was convicted of gunning down Dimmit County Sheriff Ben "Doc" Murray in January 1991 at the 68-year-old sheriff's home in Carizzo Springs, about 140 miles southwest of San Antonio.
Briseno got within a few days of his scheduled execution last April when the Court of Criminal Appeals stopped the punishment to look at the questions raised about the jury instructions.
Flawed instructions that did not allow the jury to fully consider
mitigating factors during the sentencing phase of the trial were part of
Texas' 1973 post-Furman
death penalty statute. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1989 in the
case of Penry
v. Lynaugh that jurors must be able to weigh mitigating factors,
and the state law was subsequently revised. Even so, many Texas death
sentences were routinely upheld until the Supreme Court revisited the
issue in 2007 ruling in Abdul-Kabir
v. Quarterman. Related posts are in the mitigation index.
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