HOUSTON – A Texas inmate who was scheduled to be the first to be executed by the state this year received a reprieve from an appeals court on Thursday.
Michael Dean Gonzales had been set to receive a lethal injection on Tuesday evening for fatally stabbing an elderly couple during a burglary of their West Texas home nearly 30 years ago.
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But the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted a request by his attorneys to stay his execution.
“I’m very pleased,” said Richard Burr, one of Gonzales’ attorneys, said of the execution delay.
The Texas Attorney General’s Office, which is handling the prosecution of the case, did not immediately return an email seeking comment on Thursday.
The appeals court ordered that Gonzales’ case be sent back to the trial judge in Odessa to review claims he is intellectually disabled and to review allegations that prosecutors withheld evidence in the case. The Supreme Court has barred the execution of intellectually disabled people. Gonzales’ attorneys allege his 1995 trial was marked by prosecutorial misconduct, including the hiding of the alleged misconduct by the lead investigator.
Gonzales, 48, who was a member of a gang called “Homies Don’t Play,” has claimed he did not fatally stab 73-year-old Manuel Aguirre, and his 65-year-old wife Merced, during a break-in at their Odessa home in April 1994. Merced Aguirre was stabbed at least 57 times while her husband was stabbed 11 times, according to court documents.
Attorneys for Gonzales, who lived next door to the slain couple, say new evidence points to the real killers, two other gang members.
His attorneys are asking that recently discovered evidence — including possible bloodstains on a shirt worn by another suspect and fingerprints — should be tested.
‘’Without this opportunity (to test new evidence), there is a strong likelihood the state will execute an innocent person,” Burr said earlier this week.
But prosecutors say Gonzales was found to have items stolen from the couple’s home, he had a knife consistent with causing the victims’ wounds and he confessed to a jail guard. Gonzales’ wife also testified that she helped him get into the couple’s home on the night of their deaths and when he returned, Gonzales had a knife and blood on his clothes.
“There is no evidence more damning than a first-hand account that a murderer returned to his house covered in blood holding a knife and bearing property taken from the neighbors he killed. (Gonzales’) new evidence does nothing whatsoever to undermine the evidence of identity or his guilt,” Erich Dryden, a prosecutor with the Texas Attorney General’s Office, said in court documents filed last month.
Gonzales was one of several inmates whose death sentences were overturned because of testimony from a prosecution expert who had said that race could be considered a factor in determining whether someone should receive the death penalty.
In a new trial focused only on sentencing, Gonzales was resentenced to death in 2009.
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