Texas executed Ramiro Gonzales on Wednesday regardless of a surprising reversal from a psychiatrist who helped ship him to demise row 17 years in the past.
Gonzales, 41, was killed by deadly injection at 6:50 p.m. Central time as punishment for kidnapping, raping and murdering Bridget Townsend after they had been each 18. On the time, Gonzales was fighting drug habit. He killed Townsend, his drug supplier’s girlfriend, whereas making an attempt to steal medication. He had turned 18 two months earlier than the killing, making him barely sufficiently old to be legally eligible to be sentenced to demise.
In his closing phrases, Gonzales apologized to the Townsend household. “I’m sorry I can’t articulate, I can’t put into phrases the ache I’ve precipitated y’all, the damage, what I took away that I can’t give again. I lived the remainder of this life for you guys to the most effective of my skill for restitution, restoration, taking accountability … I’m sorry.”
“The Ramiro who the state of Texas killed tonight was not the Ramiro who dedicated these crimes twenty years in the past,” Gonzales’ attorneys, Thea Posel and Raoul Schonemann stated in an announcement. “The Ramiro who left this world was, by all accounts, a deeply religious, beneficiant, affected person, and intentional individual, filled with regret, somebody whose driving pressure was love. He sought to unfold and embody love in all facets of his life, even within the deprivation and bodily isolation of demise row the place he lived for the previous 18 years.”
“Ramiro knew he took one thing from this world he may by no means give again,” Gonzales’ attorneys stated. “He lived with that disgrace day-after-day, and it formed the individual he labored so laborious to grow to be. If this nation’s authorized system was meant to encourage rehabilitation, he could be an exemplar.”
Patricia Townsend, the mom of Bridget Townsend, beforehand advised USA Right now that Gonzales’ execution could be a “joyful event” for her household, noting that it came about on her daughter’s birthday. Bridget Townsend “was a gorgeous one that liked life and liked folks,” she stated. “Each time she was with anyone she hadn’t seen shortly, she needed to hug ’em.”
Texas is the one state that requires jurors to find out that the defendant is prone to commit felony acts of violence that might “represent a unbroken risk to society” with the intention to impose a demise sentence. Throughout Gonzales’ 2006 trial, psychiatrist Edward Gripon testified that Gonzales derived pleasure from acts of sexual violence and was unlikely to cease or be rehabilitated.
Fifteen years later, Gripon reevaluated Gonzales and reversed his evaluation, citing his prior reliance on a debunked statistic and witness testimony that has since been recanted. It was the primary time the psychiatrist had issued a report altering his opinion in a demise penalty case, Gripon advised The Marshall Mission in 2022.
Texas Defender Service/Elisabetta Diorio
Like most individuals on demise row, Gonzales skilled abuse and neglect as a toddler. His mom, who was 17 when he was born, struggled with drug and alcohol habit and turned Gonzales over to her mother and father, in line with a petition for clemency, which the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected earlier this month. The primary time Gonzales met his father was when he was 19 and so they had been each locked up within the county jail.
Beginning on the age of 6, Gonzales was repeatedly sexually abused, together with by a cousin. One of many few members of the family Gonzales felt near, his aunt Loretta, was killed in a automotive accident when he was 15. He turned to cocaine and methamphetamine to deal with the grief, and dropped out of faculty, stealing and forging checks to pay for medication.
Two months after his 18th birthday, Gonzales determined to rob his drug supplier’s residence. When Townsend, who was alone inside, tried to name her boyfriend, Gonzales assaulted and killed her. After he was arrested for sexually assaulting a special girl, Gonzales confessed to killing Townsend.
“He doesn’t deserve mercy,” Patricia Townsend advised USA Right now. “And his childhood shouldn’t have something to do with it. I do know lots of people that had a tough childhood … He made his alternative.”
Gonzales was beforehand scheduled to be executed in 2022. Shortly earlier than his execution date, Gripon offered Gonzales’ appellate attorneys together with his reevaluation report, during which he acknowledged errors in his trial testimony.
In 2006, Gripon had testified that recidivism charges amongst individuals who commit intercourse offenses are as excessive as 80%. In his second report, he described how that quantity was later traced again to a 1986 Psychology Right now article and located to be baseless.
Gripon additionally initially relied on written statements from Gonzales’ cellmate, Frederick Ozuna, that described Gonzales confessing to returning to the crime scene a number of occasions to have “intercourse with the physique.” In a sworn declaration, Ozuna later recanted these statements, stating that an officer threatened him with a harsher sentence if he didn’t cooperate towards Gonzales.
“With the passage of time and vital maturity [Gonzales] is now a considerably completely different individual each mentally and emotionally,” Gripon wrote in his 2022 report. “On the present time, contemplating the entire proof offered to me, my analysis of Mr. Gonzales, and his present psychological standing, it’s my opinion, to an inexpensive psychiatric likelihood, that he doesn’t pose a risk of future hazard to society in regard to any predictable future acts of felony violence.”
Two days earlier than Gonzales’ 2022 execution date, the Texas Court docket of Legal Appeals granted a keep and instructed the trial court docket to think about Gonzales’ declare that his demise sentence resulted from false knowledgeable testimony. With out conducting a listening to or reviewing extra proof, the court docket signed verbatim the state’s “findings of reality and conclusions of legislation” and denied aid. (This isn’t uncommon: a 2018 report printed within the Harvard Legislation Overview discovered that judges adopted prosecutors’ findings of their entirety in 96% of the 191 circumstances the authors reviewed in Harris County, Texas.)
Throughout Gonzales’ 18 years on demise row, “He has earnestly devoted himself to self-improvement, contemplation, and prayer, and has grown right into a mature, peaceable, form, loving, and deeply spiritual grownup,” his attorneys wrote in a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court docket, arguing that Gonzales was ineligible for execution as a result of there was no threat or likelihood of him posing a risk to society. “He acknowledges his accountability for his crimes and has sought to atone for them and to hunt redemption by his actions.”
Gonzales earned the equal of a bachelor’s diploma from a Bible faculty and was one of many first peer coordinators when Texas demise row launched “faith-based pods.” In that position, Gonzales provided religious steering to others dealing with execution.
The Supreme Court docket declined to intervene to halt Gonzales’ execution. Gonzales was the eighth individual executed within the U.S. this 12 months. On Thursday, Oklahoma plans to execute Richard Norman Rojem Jr.
In an interview with The Marshall Mission days earlier than his demise, Gonzales addressed the strain between rehabilitating folks solely to execute them.
“I feel in the end the state is afraid to acknowledge the truth that we could be rehabilitated and be a contribution to society from jail — as a result of it goes towards how they prosecuted us, how they labeled us in court docket as menaces to society,” Gonzales stated. “I want they’d be trustworthy and say: ‘We screwed up. Individuals could be rehabilitated.’ Nevertheless it’s laborious to confess your errors, particularly when politics are concerned.”