WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from a Texas death row inmate seeking a new trial, despite receiving support from the prosecutor’s office that initially prosecuted his case.
Areli Escobar, the inmate in question, had his murder conviction and death sentence upheld by a Texas appeals court. This decision remained unchanged by the Supreme Court, even though Escobar’s situation bore similarities to that of Richard Glossip, an Oklahoma man whose murder conviction was recently overturned by the high court.
There was no explanation from the justices about why Escobar’s appeal met a different fate.
Unlike in Glossip’s case, Escobar is not facing imminent execution.
Despite a lower court’s initial order for a new trial citing evidence-related issues, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals twice denied Escobar’s appeals. Most recently, following a directive from the Supreme Court to reassess the case, the appeals court ruled against Escobar once more.
Escobar was convicted and sentenced to death in the May 2009 fatal stabbing and sexual assault of Bianca Maldonado, a 17-year-old high school student in Austin. They lived in the same apartment complex.
The focus of the prosecution case against Escobar was evidence from the Austin Police Department’s DNA lab.
But a later audit turned up problems at the lab that led Judge David Wahlberg of the Travis County District Court to conclude that Escobar’s trial was unfair.
“The State’s use of unreliable, false, or misleading DNA evidence to secure (Escobar’s) conviction violated fundamental concepts of justice,” Wahlberg wrote.
When the case returned to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Travis County prosecutors no longer were defending the conviction. Voters had elected a new district attorney, Jose Garza, who ran on a promise to hold police accountable in Austin, the state capital and county seat.
In Glossip’s case, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond backed the call to throw out the conviction and death sentence because the discovery of new evidence persuaded him Glossip did not have a fair trial.
The justices agreed, ruling that prosecutors’ decision to allow a key witness to give testimony they knew to be false violated Glossip’s constitutional right to a fair trial.
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