CAMERON COUNTY'S PROSECUTION OF VELEZ DEADLY WRONG

 "Impoverished defendants are entitled to a lower standard of defense." Ass. D.A. prosecutors
By Saki Knafo

Huffington Post

 

In 2005, Manuel Velez, a construction worker in Brownsville, Texas, moved in with his girlfriend, Acela Moreno. Two weeks later, he noticed that Moreno's 11-month-old baby, Angel, was struggling to breathe. Velez woke Moreno and went next door to get help, but by the time the rescue workers showed up, the boy had lost consciousness. Angel died in the hospital soon after.

In the following weeks, a medical examiner found signs of injuries to the baby's head -- evidence suggesting that someone had fatally hit him. Prosecutors soon fingered Velez, 40, as the culprit. Although he had no history of violence, apart from an arrest after a bar fight when he was in his 20s, a jury found Velez guilty of capital murder and sent him to death row.

Velez maintained his innocence, but had little reason to believe he would win his appeal. Of the more than 500 inmates who have walked through the gates of the state's death row unit since the reinstatement of the Texas death penalty in 1982, only 12 have been exonerated, according to data complied by the Death Penalty Information Center.

Yet as a team of lawyers began looking into the case, as part of a pro bono joint effort with the ACLU's Capital Punishment Project, the story woven by the prosecutors began to unravel. Last year, a judge reviewed the case and found that Velez's public defenders had failed to present many pieces of evidence that could have established their client's innocence. And so on Wednesday at 11:32 p.m., after five years on death row, Velez became one of the few condemned inmates in the history of the state to walk free.
"Manuel never belonged in prison, let alone on death row waiting to be executed,"said Velez's attorney, Brian Stull of the American Civil Liberties Union's Capital Punishment Project, in a statement. "He is indisputably innocent."
To Velez's supporters, his release on Wednesday is the culmination of a legal drama that exposed many of the broader problems plaguing the justice system in Texas and beyond. The case "contained a litany of injustices, including police misconduct, prosecutorial deception, ineffectiveness of defense counsel, and untruthful witnesses," said Richard Dieter, head of the Death Penalty Information Center, in a statement.
"This is the story of an innocent man who went to death row because the entire system failed," Stull told HuffPost.
If the system had worked better, Stull and other supporters argue, Velez's court-appointed attorneys would have realized that Velez could not have possibly delivered the blows that killed the infant. According to records kept by the prosecutor's own medical examiner, there was clear evidence that baby had sustained the injuries when Velez was a thousand miles away, on a construction site in Tennessee. But the lawyers, Hector Villarreal and O. Rene Flores, didn't uncover or present that evidence to the jury.
There was also evidence that Moreno routinely hit her children, and that she had on one occasion thrown Angel onto a couch from five feet away. But the lawyers didn't call any of the witnesses with this information to testify.
Villarreal has since died, and Flores didn't respond to a request for comment from HuffPost on Wednesday.
Moreno, for her part, was arrested shortly after Angel's death. She testified against Velez in exchange for a chance to plead guilty to the charge of injury to a child, a crime for which the maximum penalty is 10 years in prison. She was released from prison in 2010 and was deported to Mexico, having been staying in the United States illegally.
(To read the rest of the story, click on link below)
Prisoner Walks Free After Years On Texas Death Row