Thread: 3 Texas death row inmates lose appeals

HOUSTON — The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Wednesday rejected appeals from three condemned prisoners, including a pair sent to death row for slayings that were part of a Houston crime spree.

The state's highest criminal court refused appeals in the cases of Walter Sorto, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, and Edgardo Cubas, who's from Honduras, who were tried separately and convicted of capital murder in the 2002 deaths two Houston waitresses.

Marina Moreno Rangel, 38, and Roxana Aracelle Capulin, 24., were abducted as they left work, then raped and shot. Their bodies, with duct tape covering their eyes and mouths, were found the next day in an abandoned vehicle.

The women were among numerous victims of robbery, assault, rape and murder attributed to Sorto, Cubas and a third male who was 15 at the time of his arrest. He was tried as an adult but was ineligible for the death penalty because of his age.

The crimes from late 2001 to the spring of 2002 had frightened residents of a predominantly Hispanic area of Houston known as the East End.

Police arrested the three after Sorto tried to claim a nonexistent reward for providing information about the two women's slayings.

Neither Sorto, 31, convicted in 2003, nor Cubas, 30, condemned in 2004, has an execution date. They can take their appeals yet to the federal courts.

In the third rejection from the Court of Criminal Appeals Wednesday, the judges refused an appeal from Edward Lee Busby Jr., condemned for the 2004 suffocation of 77-year-old retired TCU professor Laura Lee Crane. The woman was abducted from a Fort Worth grocery store parking lot.

Busby, 36, was arrested in Oklahoma City driving Crane's car. He later led authorities to her body in Murray County in Oklahoma, just north of the Texas state line. Evidence showed the woman suffocated after her face was wrapped with more than 23 feet of duct tape.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/6280412.html#

I'm sorry, but even if the third person was 15 he should be punished the same way the rest of them are. He will forever be a threat to our society. He was old enough to know it was wrong!!!!