May 26, 2008, 1:53AM
Will death become the exception, not the rule?
Quintero case highlights a shift some attribute to sentence options, DNA, plea deals


By MIKE TOLSON
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

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Officer's wife reacts to verdict, houston,chron.com,quintero,houston chronicle,texas,local news,rodney johnson, Joslyn Johnson reacts to a jury's decision that Juan Leonardo Quintero should spend the rest of his life in prison rather than go to death row for murdering her husband in 2006. Video by Meg Loucks. Pool footage by KTRK. May 20, 2008. Quintero sentenced to life in prison, hpd,texas,rodney johnson,local news,houston chronicle,quintero,houston,chron.com, Jurors sentenced Juan Leonardo Quintero to life in prison for the murder of Officer Rodney Johnson. Johnson's sister, Susan, gave a victim's statement. Pool footage provided by KTRK. May 20, 2008.HPD funeral, local-news,rodney johnson,hpd,houston chronicle, Friends and family gathered to mourn the death of HPD officer Rodney Johnson.Opening arguments in Quintero trial, houston chronicle,texas,houston,chron.com, The death-penalty trial of Juan Leonardo Quintero opened this morning. Quintero is on trial for killing a Houston police officer in 2006. Pool video footage courtesy of KTRK TV 13. Quintero's confession, texas,houston chronicle,chron.com,houston, Jurors in the death-penalty trial of Juan Leonardo Quintero watched a videotape this morning in which he acknowledged shooting Houston police Officer Rodney Johnson. Video courtesy of KHOU-TV
From shooting to sentencing — images from the case If there was one thing that was all but certain in the world of Houston criminal justice, it was that someone who killed a law enforcement officer ended up paying with his life. So inevitable was this simple rule of cause and effect that the rare deviation came with a ready explanation.

When, for instance, Man Nhu Truong got a life sentence for killing an off-duty sheriff's deputy at a wedding in 1996, lawyers pointed immediately to the unusual absence of a criminal record or history of violence.

When Edward John Benavides escaped death after shooting a Pasadena police officer in a 1993 drug raid, the mechanics of the raid itself became an issue: A lingering possibility was that Benavides, suddenly roused from sleep, may not have known exactly what was going on when he started firing.

But now comes the case of Juan Quintero. The life sentence given to the illegal immigrant by a jury last week has no such asterisk attached. The jury decided to spare him, despite the brutal killing of Houston police officer Rodney Johnson, which raises the question of whether any death case — even in the nation's death penalty capital — is a slam-dunk anymore.

One of his attorneys, Danalynn Recer, was so impressed by the verdict that she made a point of praising the local citizenry, not the habit of longtime Houston capital defense attorneys.

"It is simply not true that the citizens of Harris County respond with knee-jerk, hateful reactions to violent crime," Recer said. "We have this strange myth that Harris County automatically has the death penalty for police shootings."

Technically, she may be right. Quintero's life sentence, of course, is not unprecedented. Over the past 20 years, defendants have faced capital murder charges in at least 19 police officer killings. In two of those cases, one in 2003 and one in 2006, death sentences were not sought. In the other 17, four defendants escaped the needle.

Besides Truong and Benavides, Alex Adams got a life sentence for killing Houston police officer Albert Vasquez in 2001 and Keith Burl Turner got the same for shooting Harris County sheriff's Deputy Jeffery Scott Sanford in 1991.

Turner's sentence was surprising, but there were some odd elements to the crime. Sanford, a procurement officer, was off-duty when he stumbled across a robbery at a convenience store. Instead of calling for backup, he rushed into the store to try to stop the robbery.


Outside factors
Adams' sentence was as perplexing — and widely denounced — as Quintero's. He had been arrested during a drug sweep at an apartment complex and was handcuffed to another prisoner when he shot Vasquez with a pistol he had concealed in bandages. His sentence angered the jury foreman, who said several jurors spared Adams because of a difficult childhood, immaturity and low IQ.

With Quintero, there was some disputed testimony about a brain problem that could have made him fear Johnson more than he should have and react irrationally. Whatever influence, if any, that evidence had on jurors, Recer turned to a simpler explanation: "They saw his humanity."

Quintero's jurors also had the benefit of a sentencing option not available in Texas until 2005: life without parole. Criminal justice experts, especially those focusing on capital punishment, say the landscape has been altered in recent years, in part by life-without-parole options in 35 of the 36 states with the death penalty and in part by shaken confidence arising from the significant number of people removed from death row after DNA testing.

It's not so much that juries are eschewing death, as they did with Quintero, but that prosecutors are pursuing fewer death cases, reserving those for their most heinous murders.

"There are fewer of these cases going to trial," said John Niland, director of the Capital Trial Project for the Texas Defender Service, which assists indigent defendants in capital cases. "I think there's a willingness to plead cases that, just from a statistical standpoint, wasn't there before."

Expense enters into it, Niland said, especially in smaller counties. If there is a reasonable chance a jury would choose life without parole, the pressure to dispose of the case is significant.

"The prosecutors don't like to lose, and they feel like they lose when they get a life verdict if they are seeking death," he said. "The prosecutors also know that life without parole means exactly that. They can assure the victim's family that he will die in prison. In trying to resolve a case, prosecutors can need some cover, and life without parole gives it to them."


An unexplained drop
Over the past few years, death sentences have declined by almost two-thirds in Texas and the rest of the country. There is no pat explanation for the drop, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, an information clearinghouse opposed to capital punishment.

"I wouldn't attribute it to one reason," Dieter said. "Life without parole has to be included. The emergence of DNA testing and innocence cases has been a factor, maybe even a bigger factor. So many cases were highlighted in the media and on television shows and movies. There has been quite a pronounced effect that has given some skepticism to jurors when they are asked to impose a death sentence."

Guilt was not a real issue in Quintero's case. Recer's job was to try to save his life. To just about everyone's surprise, including Quintero's, she succeeded. There may be no message implicit in the jury's decision, but it may give pause to prosecutors as they weigh whether to offer plea deals.

David Dow is one of many death penalty opponents who would be happy if that turned out to be true. The University of Houston law professor, who directs a local innocence project targeting potentially problematic death cases, was pleased by the verdict but reluctant to draw any conclusions from it.

"I think you need more than one case," Dow said. "But the consistent decline in the number of death verdicts suggests not so much a moral change in whether the death penalty is something that should or should not be given, but perhaps a change in how it should be applied to certain cases."

mike.tolson@chron.com




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