WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from a Texas death row inmate whose bid for a new trial drew the support of the prosecutor’s office that originally put him on death row.
The justices left in place a Texas appeals court ruling that upheld the murder conviction and death sentence for Areli Escobar, even though Escobar’s case is similar to that of an Oklahoma man, Richard Glossip, whose murder conviction the high court recently overturned.
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.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has twice rejected Escobar’s appeals. The first time followed a lower court decision ordering a new trial after the judge identified problems with the evidence. More recently, the appeals court again ruled against Escobar after the Supreme Court had ordered it to reconsider.
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.
