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TEXAS: (execution)
Convicted killer Jessy Carlos San Miguel, a 10th grade dropout with a history of mayhem, was executed Thursday evening for leaving 4 people dead after robbing a Dallas-area Taco Bell 9 years ago.
In a brief final statement, San Miguel urged friends and relatives watching him die to be strong and said he loved them.
"It's going to be all
right," he said. "Ironic, isn't it, you know?" he noted while his arms
were outstretched on the death chamber gurney.
"I'm a cross. Y'all take
care of each other. I'll be watching over you."
Asked by the warden if that was all he had to say, San Miguel replied, "Yeah."
As the drugs began taking
effect, he sputtered and gasped. He was pronounced dead at
6:19 p.m., 8 minutes
after the lethal doses began.
6 members of his victims' families watched him die, but he never acknowledged their presence.
San Miguel's lethal injection, attracted little of the attention of a week ago when hundreds of demonstrators and media descended on Huntsville for the execution of Gary Graham.
Graham's claims that he was innocent and was tried unfairly put under intense national scrutiny the support of the death penalty by Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
Unlike Graham, who was belligerent with officers throughout his final hours, San Miguel was reported docile as his punishment time approached and the U.S. Supreme Court was delivered 11th-hour appeals.
The carnage after San Miguel and an accomplice left the suburban Irving Taco Bell before dawn Jan. 26, 1991 was so overwhelming, the police officer who discovered the 4 bodies in the walk-in freezer fainted.
And there was so much blood on the floor, authorities had to use a squeegee to locate the spent cartridges from the murder weapon.
"It was just a cold-blooded, methodical execution of four people," Toby Shook, an assistant district attorney in Dallas County who prosecuted the case, said.
San Miguel and his attorneys contended he unfairly was convicted because of racial stereotyping, that prosecutors and his own court-appointed defense attorney cited Mexican-American culture in their arguments to the jury that sentenced him to death.
"What troubles me is Gov. Bush continually tells the media and the newspapers that he has always been fair, that they have ways in the system to be ensured everybody has a fair trial, but all that is not true," San Miguel said in a death row interview Wednesday.
San Miguel was convicted
and condemned for fatally shooting Michael Phelan, 28, the assistant manager
at the restaurant. The other victims included restaurant employees Theresa
Fraga, 16, of Irving, and her cousin, Frank Fraga, 23, of Dallas; and a
friend of Ms. Fraga's, Son
Truong Nguyen, 35, of
Mesquite.
Theresa Fraga was 6 months pregnant. Nguyen had been wounded while serving in the Vietnamese army, then fled the war-torn country for what he thought would be a life of safety in the United States.
Phelan and Nguyen were shot once in the head. The Fraga cousins were shot twice in the head.
San Miguel and a companion, Jerome Mike Green, were pulled over by Irving police who suspected them of drunken driving. When the officers found a Taco Bell bag filled with $1,390, 2 ski masks, a 9 mm pistol and 2 pairs of gloves, they began checking the chain's restaurants in the area for a robbery. The slaughter was discovered a few blocks away.
Green had worked part-time at the restaurant. San Miguel, records showed, had applied for a job there but was not hired. At the time, the 19-year-old San Miguel was free on bonds totaling $45,000 on 4 charges of weapons violations and burglaries.
He confessed to police that he robbed the store and shot the victims. He did not testify at his trial.
Green later pleaded guilty and received a 50-year prison term.
Evidence showed the pair planned the robbery for a few weeks and waited outside the locked place during the overnight hours until employees opened the door to take out the trash.
Nguyen was waiting outside to pick up Theresa Fraga from work when he was herded into the cooler with the Fraga cousins while San Miguel waited with Phelan for a time-lock safe to open.
According to Shook, San Miguel said in his confession he left the restaurant and the hostages in the cooler but went back inside "and asked them to give him a good reason why he shouldn't kill them."
"Then he started shooting," the prosecutor said.
"It wasn't supposed to happen like this," San Miguel said from death row. "There is nothing I could do to stop what happened. People react in the heat of the moment, in the heat of deep emotions. When something happens out of instinct, we just do it. We don't do it out of intent. We don't do it on purpose. It just happens."
According to court records, San Miguel told an officer while in jail: "The only reason why I killed those people is they couldn't make good Mexican food."
San Miguel was well known to police. He had been arrested 9 times and was accused at age 16 of shooting another person. He also was linked to at least 2 drive-by shootings and a number of burglaries.
"He'd just kind of done it all," Shook said. "It wasn't gang related. Testimony showed he was kind of his own gang. He didn't need it. He did his own stuff."
San Miguel becomes the 24th condemned prisoner to be put to death this year in Texas, and the 223rd overall since the state resumed capital punishment on Dec. 17, 1982.
San Miguel becomes the 5th condemned prisoner to be put to death this month, and the 136th overall to be put to death since Gov. George Bush took office in Jan. 1995.
And San Miguel becomes the 52nd condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 650th overall since America resumed executions on Jan. 17, 1977.
*****************
In the middle of a presidential campaign swing to court minority voters, Texas Gov. George W. Bush may face another clemency decision today in a death penalty case marked by allegations of racial bias.
The case of Jessy San
Miguel has not attracted as much mainstream media attention as did that
of Gary Graham, executed last week amid protests from civil rights groups
and celebrities. San Miguel, 28, has long admitted to the brutal slaying
of 4 people in a Taco Bell restaurant
in 1991.
However, Spanish-language
media have focused on the role race played in San Miguel's death sentence,
leading some political analysts to say that Bush's actions may affect his
determined outreach to Latinos, who are increasingly concerned about racial
bias despite a traditionally
tough stance on criminal
justice issues.
'A Groundswell of Protest and Concern'
The case also shows the growing political debate over the death penalty in the U.S. and Texas, where Bush has presided over 135 executions, more than any other governor in history.
"The level of disparity
in the system is getting to the point where you're beginning to see a groundswell
of protest and concern," said Charles Kamasaki, senior vice president for
the National Council of La Raza, one of the country's largest Latino advocacy
groups. "It could
become a potential problem
for any candidate who doesn't handle it correctly."
San Miguel's attorneys
made a final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court late Wednesday. Legal experts
said they expected the court to reject it, setting up Bush to make a decision
sometime today. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles has already rejected
a clemency request,
18 to 0.
Since the Texas attorney general's office said earlier this month that race may have played an improper role in as many as half a dozen Texas death penalty cases, San Miguel's lawyers have been scrambling to take advantage of the surprise admission to prove that their client also suffered from references to his Latino heritage during trial.
San Miguel's original defense attorney, in an attempt to show his client's danger was associated with youthful bravado, tried to elicit testimony from several witnesses about Mexican Americans and "macho" culture.
Allusions to Race Made During Trial
At one point, Dallas-based attorney Edward W. Gray asked 1 witness: "A young Mexican American man does not let anyone insult or belittle his woman, does he?" Gray said in an interview Wednesday that he was trying to show that San Miguel's propensity for fighting was typical for his peer group.
San Miguel's current lawyers
also argue that the prosecutor made a thinly veiled reference to San Miguel's
Latino heritage by criticizing "those that cross the border and commit
crimes." The Dallas County district attorney's office disputes that, saying
the reference was to
Taco Bell commercials
at the time that urged patrons to "run for the border."
Danalynn Recer, one of San Miguel's lawyers, said her client admits killing restaurant manager Michael Phelan and 3 others, including a young pregnant woman. Police say the 4 were shot at close range as they knelt in the restaurant cooler during a botched robbery attempt.
But Recer appealed to Bush for a 30-day stay to allow the courts to consider the role that San Miguel's race may have played in convincing jurors to sentence him to death.
"He has to realize he has to be consistent," Recer said. "You can't just take an occasional case and make a statement about race. Everything in the death penalty is about race."
A spokesman for the Texas
attorney general's office said San Miguel's case was far different from
the ones they agreed to review after determining that an expert witness
for the state had erred in telling jurors in several trials that Latinos
and blacks were more likely to be
dangerous in the future
than whites.
For one thing, it was San Miguel's defense attorney, not a state witness, who made most of the allegedly biased statements. And for another, the statements in San Miguel's case were not made by an expert witness, who would carry more credibility with jurors.
"There is no error to admit on the part of the state," said Heather Browne, a spokeswoman for Texas Atty. Gen. John Cornyn.
Latinos Will Watch Bush Closely
Bush spokesman Mike Jones
said the governor would make no decision on the case until after all legal
appeals have been exhausted. As usual, Bush will apply two standards: whether
the defendant had full access to the courts and whether the defendant is
innocent. No special
consideration will be
made due to the race allegations, Jones said.
For Bush, the perils of the case are as much legal as political. Latinos will watch closely how he handles it because charges of racism are at play, analysts said.
Latinos may play a crucial
role in the election this fall in Florida, where they helped tip the state
toward Clinton in 1996, and possibly California. Although the likely Democratic
presidential nominee, Vice President Al Gore, is safely ahead in most polls
in California now,
Bush could draw enough
Latino votes to make the race competitive, analysts said.
If Bush seems insensitive to the race issues raised in the case, his decision could be interpreted badly, some Latino experts said.
"If it turns out that his decision indicates some kind of ethnic stereotyping, that certainly will resonate very heavily with the Latino community in the future," said Harry Pachon, head of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at the Claremont Colleges.
Still, the death penalty is popular with Latinos, though not as popular as it is with whites. A 1999 poll showed that 65% of Latinos support the death penalty, compared with 77% of whites and 39% of blacks.
As a result, Bush could easily condemn the remarks of the defense attorney while upholding the death penalty, an act that could mollify Latinos upset by the apparent prejudice in the case, experts said.
Since Latinos are disproportionately the victims of crime, many take a hard line on criminal justice issues, said Rudy De La Garza, a University of Texas professor.
2 of San Miguel's victims, Theresa Fraga and cook Frank Fraga, were Latinos. One, Son Nguyen, was of Asian descent.
"If you could play up the role of blood lust, you could begin to damage Bush," De La Garza said. "But at the same time, he's out there massaging the hell out of everybody. My sense is that other issues are much more important to this population" of Latino voters.
Awareness of Case Only Recent for Some
Several Latino groups have become aware of San Miguel's pleas only recently.
Officials with the League of United Latin American Citizens, at whose national convention Bush spoke Monday, scrambled to file a direct plea to Bush on Wednesday night.
"I'm banking on faith that they'll wake up to the fact that if there's an issue of this nature, they ought to consider it and take a good look at it," said Ray Velarde, national representative for the group, one of the largest and oldest Latino advocacy organizations.
(source: Los Angeles Times)
******************
TEXAS:
Lawyers for a Texas death row inmate set to die Thursday say their client's trial was tainted with racial stereotypes promoted by both prosecutors and his own court-appointed attorney.
Attorneys for Jessy Carlos San Miguel, a 10th grade dropout with a history of violence, appealed Wednesday for the convicted killer to get a new sentencing hearing.
San Miguel, 28, was condemned for a January 1991 shooting spree that left the assistant manager of a Dallas-area Taco Bell dead along with 3 other people.
Several of San Miguel's high school classmates testified about his violent past during the punishment phase of the trial. Before his arrest for the shooting deaths, San Miguel had been arrested 9 times and accused at age 16 of shooting another person in the stomach.
During cross-examination of an Hispanic witness during the punishment phase of San Miguel's trial, court-appointed attorney Ed Gray said, "Being macho and not letting people push you around is kind of - is part of the Mexican-American culture, isn't it?"
Prosecutors referred to Taco Bell and its then-popular "run for the border" commercials in their closing arguments, saying: "On this side of the border is all the law abiding citizens. On this side of the border is those that cross that border sometimes and commit crimes."
Lawyers for San Miguel say the problems are similar to those in 7 death row cases that are being reviewed by Texas Attorney General John Cornyn after a former state prison psychologist presented expert testimony that being black or Hispanic increased the risk of further dangerousness.
At Cornyn's request, the U.S. Supreme Court June 5 overturned the death sentence of convicted killer Victor Saldano because of psychologist Walter Quijano's testimony. Quijano testified in all 7 trials the state is reconsidering, but was not involved in San Miguel's case.
"Racial stereotypes about Mexican-Americans were loosed in Mr. San Miguel's sentencing trial just as much as they were in Mr. Saldano's," said San Miguel's attorney Mandy Welch. "His attorney lumped Mr. San Miguel as a member of nameless, faceless group instead of humanizing him.
He was trying to say, 'He's not mean. He's Mexican.'"
San Miguel, who was born in Washington state and grew up in the Dallas area, supported his lawyer's claims during a death row interview Wednesday.
"The evidence is so obvious that I had a very unfair trial," he said."They did not base their decisions on my history, on my individuality. It was based on me being a Mexican."
San Miguel's attorneys appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected San Miguel's appeals to halt the execution.
Heather Browne, a spokeswoman for the Texas attorney general's office, said the differences between this case and the Saldano case are that the race-based statements weren't made by a state-introduced witness nor was the witness giving expert testimony.
Gray denies making racially insensitive comments and said he provided an adequate defense considering San Miguel admitted to the crime and signed two confessions.
"I was trying to establish Jessy was typical among his peers," Gray said. "He had a very fair trial. The evidence against him was overwhelming."
Dallas County Assistant Prosecutor Toby Shook, who prosecuted and won the death sentence for San Miguel, called the claims of racial stereotyping "ridiculous."
"That's something they're dreaming up," Shook said. "This murder happened in a Taco Bell and his lawyer was trying to explain his client's long and violent history."
San Miguel's execution
would be the 24th in Texas this year and the 5th this month.
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