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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 In an unusual move, the court designated that its decision not be published.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.