Daily Archives: March 8, 2023

Every death penalty case has its own share prosecutorial charging arbitrariness, prosecution/law enforcement misconduct, juries selected exclusively to convict, judicially ignored or prosecution suppression of evidence of innocence, and lengthy post-conviction proceedings that can stretch into decades—all good reasons why the death penalty should be abolished. The  damage the penalty inflicts on the nation’s criminal justice system far outweigh any arguable value it may have in our society.

The Michael Dean Gonzales case is no exception.

An elderly husband/wife couple, 73-year-old Manuel Lugan Aquirre, Sr. and 65 year old Merced Gonzales Aquirre, were stabbed to death in their home in Odessa, Texas on April 21, 1994.

Gonzales, a next door neighbor of the Aquirres, was an immediate suspect in their killings because of a history of conflict between the neighbors.

Two weeks later, May 7, 1994, Gonzales was arrested and capital murder under Texas’s death penalty statute, Tex. Penal Code § 19.03. The statute authorizes the death penalty for 10 different crimes of murder. Gonzales was indicted under two of the statute’s subsections: (a)(2) that he killed Merced Aquirre during the commission of a burglary; and (a)(7) that he killed both individuals in the same transaction.

Gonzales was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death on December 8, 1994. That started what has become nearly a three decade post-conviction process, as outlined below:

1. On June 3, 1998 conviction and death sentence upheld on direct appeal by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA). One of the 18 issues raised on direct appeal was that the State failed to prove during the punishment phase of his trial that he killed the Aquirres as part of the same criminal transaction thereby rendering the death penalty illegal. The CCA rejected that issue. In an unusual move, the court designated that its decision not be published.
2. On October 13, 1998, Gonzales filed his first post-conviction habeas corpus application in the Ector County court raising 7 issues for relief. The application was denied and that decision was upheld by the CCA on March 10, 1999.
3. Gonzales initiated federal habeas corpus in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. That Court in 2003 upheld Gonzales’ conviction but reversed his death sentence. Three years later the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling, effectively sending Gonzales’ case back to the state trial court for a new punishment trial.
4. The new punishment trial was conducted on May 7, 2009 and Gonzales was again sentenced to death. The CCA upheld the second death sentence on September 28, 2011.
5. Gonzales initiated a second round of habeas pleadings. The trial court denied relief and the CCA upheld that decision in 2015, finding that Gonzales had abused the habeas process. The federal district court denied habeas relief in 2018 and the Fifth Circuit refused to hear the case in 2019.

In 2020, Gonzales filed a series of motions, one for DNA testing permissible under the provisions set forth in Chapter 64 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, and another to have the Texas Attorney General’s Office removed from the post-conviction process. The trial court denied the “new evidence” issues and in a 24-page decision handed down on March 3, 2022, the CCA rejected Gonzales’ attempts for DNA discovery to show that he did not kill the Aquirres in the same transaction.

While those pleadings were pending, a March 8, 2022 execution date was set for Gonzales by the Ector County criminal court.

 Faced with an impending execution date Gonzales’ Houston criminal defense attorney Richard Burr, one of the most respected death penalty attorneys in the nation, filed a 169-page habeas application essentially arguing that the state had engaged in serious prosecutorial misconduct, that new evidence would support Gonzales’ exoneration, and that Gonzales was too intellectually disabled to be executed.

In response to Burr’s emergency habeas petition, the CCA issued a stay order of the March 8 execution on February 28, 2022.

The CCA’s decision-making is both inexplicable and convoluted. Why grant a stay based on possible new exonerating evidence on February 28 only to rule three days later that there was no basis for a new evidence discovery process?

Richard Burr’s latest habeas petition is a chronicle of a law enforcement investigation process and the actual handling of the prosecution of Michael Dean Gonzales that involves unethical fabrications and the suppression of significant exonerating evidence.

And it stands as an indictment that as the Gonzales case meandered through the state and federal post-conviction process for roughly 28 years, these issues went either unnoticed or ignored. In a case penalty case, one never really knows.

Whether Michael Dean Gonzales is completely innocent of the Aquirres murders, or had some lesser degree of involvement in them, or is now too intellectual disabled to be executed are issues yet to be determined.

But what can be reasonably stated, and decided, is this case points to a need to abolish the death penalty in the state of Texas.

I do not believe he killed his wife, Maggie, or their son, Paul.

Here’s why:

The two gun theory does not work for me. Paul was killed with a shotgun blast to the head. Maggie was shot at least five times with a long rifle.

Maggie and Paul were killed near the family’s dog kennel. A video from Paul’s cellphone placed the trio together at the kennel shortly before the murders.

Where were the guns? It defies logic that Alex Murdaugh would have had them at the kennel. How could he conceal them at the kennel and retrieved them without Maggie or Paul noticing it?

If the guns were not stashed at the kennel, that means Alex would have quickly gone to a distant location, got the two guns, and returned to the kennel carrying a gun in each hand. Maggie and Paul would have seen him approaching carry both guns. Such an unusual sight would have aroused a fearful suspicion.

Once back at the kennel with the two guns, he would have had to shoot Paul in the head with the shotgun, drop it, pick up the long rifle, and shoot Maggie five times.

That defies logic, physics, and human behavior, especially by someone the prosecution, as well as the judge, said was an opioid addict.

And why didn’t the police immediately perform a GSR (gunshot residue) test on Murdaugh’s hands? GSR testing is standard law enforcement protocol when they are in the early stages of a family murder investigation.

None of the guns found at the Murdaugh residence were ever identified at the murder weapons that killed Maggie and Paul.

And how did Murdaugh get rid of the clothing, and clean himself—both of which would have contained blood, skin tissue, and brain matter—during the narrow 17-minute timeline laid out by the prosecution?

Why didn’t the police search the Murdaugh residence and grounds for that critical evidence?

My theory is this: two social media-driven teenagers showed up at the residence looking for Paul. They wanted to exact vengeance because Paul killed that young lady in a boating accident. Social media was filled with death threats and vows of revenge against Paul.

The teenagers entered the Murdaugh residence not realizing Alex was asleep inside. They found weapons readily accessible in the residence. Each picked up a gun. Both were cowards. They went outside to look around and stumbled upon Maggie and Paul. Surprised and afraid, one reflexively shot Paul and the other shot Maggie—the five bullet wounds a measure of the shooter’s fear.

They fled with the weapons—and they got away with murder.

National divorce.

That’s what Georgia right-wing Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is once again advocating: a divorce between Republican and Democratic states with the federal government being a small overseer of the two divided union.

Now Ms. Greene knows a thing or two about divorce. She recently divorced her husband after numerous media reports circulated about her alleged adulterous affairs with other men which left their marriage “irreconcilably broken.”

That will do it every time.

And Ms. Greene, even before her congressional days, has also been a longtime divorcee of Sanity, preferring to life partner with Insanity to help her through the tumultuous paths of life. There is the proverbial saying that, “ignorance is bliss.”

It’s worth looking at some basic facts before the Red and Blue states disavow their constitutional marriage:

• Red Union would get 8 of the 10 states with the highest unemployment.
• Red Union would get the five states with the highest murder rate.
• Red Union would get 6 out of the top 10 states with the highest suicide rate.
• Red Union would get 9 out of the top 10 states with the highest poverty rates.
• Red Union would only get 3 out of the top 10 most educated states.
• Red Union would get 8 out of the top 10 states with the highest divorce rates.

The last fact may be appealing to the congresswoman but it doesn’t appear that given these basic social facts, the Red Union would benefit from a “national divorce.”

However, for someone whose marriage to Sanity is “irreconcilably broken,” it may seem like a good deal—sort of like shopping for that “ocean front property in Arizona.”

As if America does not have enough problems, the country of “one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” must now fret over some of its elected leaders calling for a “national divorce” (QAnon speech for “succession”) in order to keep political and racial divisions alive.

I lost six minutes of precious sleep last night fretting over Rep. Greene’s “national divorce,” and tack on another lost hour of life  preparing this post.

We all have two whether we like it or not.

Some are good, some bad; some responsible, others not so much.

Recently, 14-year-old Adriana Kuch, a former student at Regional Center High School in Berkeley Township, New Jersey, took her own life after a video was posted online that showed the teen being brutally assaulted by a thuggish group of teenage girls in the hallway of the school on February 1, 2023.

Two days later Adriana killed herself. While we will never know the precise reason why she took her own life, it is more than reasonable to assume that the beating by the school hallway terrorists and its posting online contributed to that decision.

Who is responsible for this child’s death?

Certainly some school officials are, and they should be criminally prosecuted. They knew bullying was a problem at the school and did nothing about it. That makes them co-conspirators in the official negligence that led to Adriana’s untimely death.

And all the culprits who were involved in the actual assault and others who had prior knowledge of the conspiracy to assault Adriana should be prosecuted and sent to a juvenile detention facility until they reach age 18. Send them to a place where bullying is a fine art.

But it is the parents of the attackers who bear the greatest responsibility for the acts of their bullying children. By giving these children the breath of life, they assumed a responsibility to provide them with decent, responsible lessons of behavior.

And these parents knew by the time their children reached ten or twelve years of age that they were problems; that they liked to hurt, ridicule, and hate others outside their little social orbits. And, like the school officials, the parents did nothing, or very little, to correct their children’s cruel, irresponsible behavior, much less try to prevent it.

In a Washington Post opinion piece today, Kate Woodsome said American teens are “unwell” because “American society is unwell.”

Woodsome observed that “solutions” to making teens well “start with compassionate, radical honesty: American kids are unwell because American society is unwell. The systems and social media making teenagers sad, angry and afraid today were shaped in part by adults who grew up sad, angry and afraid themselves.”

Those “adults” Woodsome referred to are primarily the parents, and the fact that they may have had a “sad, angry and afraid” upbringing is no excuse for allowing their children to become school hallway terrorists.

Parents have a responsibility as long as their children are under their household to monitor their behavior and correct their mean, self-centered behavior.

The problem is that most of the school hallway terrorists got their training from mean-spirited, often racist, and socially disgruntled parents who see life through a prism of self-interest, grievance blaming, and enough prejudices to fill the Grand Canyon.

Hopefully, there will be some serious accountability for all those who contributed to Adriana’s death.

Probably not, though. The school hallway terrorists may get a few hours of “good behavior” training at the local mall and 30 minutes of restriction from social media.

And their parents will curse and blame Adriana.

Bad experiences.

We all have them at one time or another. They generally tell us how flawed we are or how absurd people around us are.

I had one of those bad experiences yesterday.

I accompanied my wife to a gynecologist’s office.  She was there to have an in office procedure done for a “female problem.” I’ve learned over time, especially as we’ve aged, not to explore much beyond that definition.

The doctor’s office had a small waiting room with three chairs, and a 2021 edition of Vogue Magazine. Of course, silly me, I picked the magazine up to thumb through it. I’ve never met a Vogue in my entire life although I’ve known my fair share of Rogues.

Anyway, I did not recognize the name of a single person in the magazine—and the people I saw seemed to be rather pretentious in both dress and personal manner. I certainly would not be seen in public with some of the clothes those folks had on. I was embarrassed for them.

And, worse yet, those ads. I did not recognize, much less be able to pronounce, any of the products (from jewelry to perfume) featured in the magazine. Take that back, there was one Geico ad, but even it did not feature the Lizard.

Somehow, boredom forced me to turn each page from cover to cover as I fought down the urge to scratch (or pick) my nose begging for hand relief.

And then there were those women—all of whom had “female problems,” some of which were either caused by or contributed to by men—with their furrowed brow looks and uncomfortable body language. I had to fight down the almost irresistible impulse to stand and shout:

“Alright, alright, I’m sorry I’m a fucking man but whatever “female problem” my wife was NOT caused by me. Forgive me if I must stand to pee while you are forced to sit to pee. Take that grievance up with someone with more power than me. Okay, okay, just please forgive me for being a man and not being here for a ‘procedure.’”

And one lady came in wearing yellow tennis shoes no less. I didn’t hold that against her. I stood up and gave her my chair and pointed to that goddamn 2021 Vogue Magazine.

And then it happened.

Tummy started acting like a real beast. Each morning I feed the little sonuvabitch a banana, a whole glass of chocolate milk, and a vitamin B-12 tablet. That will generally pacify the little demon until 11:00 a.m. when I am more generous with the calorie intake.

But the wife’s appointment was for 11:15. I figured Tummy could relax until the procedure was over and we could stop at the local Wendy’s for a burger, those good Wendy fries, and a large coke before heading home. That would satisfy Tummy until we got home where a 30-minute afternoon nap awaited us.

But no that little monster was having nothing to do with those well thought out plans. Between 11:30 and quarter of twelve, Tummy started its growling routine—sort of low pleading at first around 11:30 but thoroughly pissed off full-throttle growling shortly before noon.

And, yes, the stares from those three women, especially the yellow tennis shoes lady, became more penetrating, refusing to conceal their collective disgust. Not only was I a man on sacred turf, the only damn “male problem” I had was a fucking Tummy in open rebellion. Those damn stares and body twitching in the chairs almost made me wish I was back in prison.

And then there she was, walking out of the back area where they do all those “female procedures” into the waiting room. I wanted to just rush up, pick her up, and shout above those hostile glares, “thank God, thank God – we’re free to go. The feeling was almost as sensational as walking out of prison.”

I once again fought down an irresistible impulse to say before leaving the lobby area, “fuck y’all … it’s my Tummy and it will growl if it wants to.”

But I was civilized – I just took a cowardly, hasty retreat out the door.”

And we did not stop at Wendy’s to get those damn fries. I told wife:

“Home, Jane … I will eat that leftover shrimp fried in the fridge. Fucking little Tummy ain’t gonna get those fries today,”

Now, that is what you call a “bad experience.”