Texas’ highest criminal court has ordered that a new punishment trial be held for a 46-year-old man sentenced to death years ago for orchestrating the murder of six rival gang members.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals issued its ruling last Wednesday in the case of Humberto Garza, who has been on death row since 2005, for a heinous crime known as the “Edinburg Massacre.”
Garza, a high-ranking member of the Tri-City Bombers, organized a “pseudocop” cop robbery in Edinburg on Jan. 5, 2003.
“When the officers arrived at the property, which had two small houses on it, they found the bodies of six men who had been shot. Some of the bodies were bound with extension cords. Several of the victims were Texas Chicano Brotherhood gang members, including one victim who was a ‘captain’ in the organization,” the ruling stated.
Those victims included Jimmy Almendarez, Juan Delgado III, Jerry Eugene Hidalgo, Juan Delgado Jr., Ruben Castillo and Ray Hidalgo.
In its ruling, the high criminal court determined that Garza received ineffective assistance of counsel during the punishment phase of his trial because his attorneys failed to conduct a meaningful mitigation investigation.
The man’s appellate counsel discovered a host of mitigating factors in its investigation, including childhood trauma such as Garza seeing a man shot in front of him at close range; sexual abuse; the continued incarceration of his father who is credited with creating the pseudocop robbery in the Rio Grande Valley; and neglect from his mother who frequently drank alcohol while pregnant with him — all facts the jury that sentenced him to death never heard.
“Based on our independent review of the record, we conclude that Applicant is entitled to a new punishment hearing because his trial counsel’s mitigation investigation fell below an objective standard of reasonableness, and had counsel not been deficient, there is a reasonable probability that at least one juror would have struck a different balance and would have answered the mitigation issue differently, voting to spare Applicant’s life,” the 51-page ruling stated.
However, there is a dissenting opinion from the court, which says the aggravating evidence against Garza is overwhelming and the facts of the offense are heinous.
“Although Applicant has presented evidence that suggests his parents neglected him, used severe disciplinary methods, set a bad example for him, and made other mistakes, his evidence that his parents spoiled him with material possessions sounds like he is also making some kind of ‘affluenza’ claim. At any rate, these parenting blunders pale in comparison to the mistreatment suffered by other applicants who have had their death sentences overturned,” the four-page dissenting opinion reads.
That opinion also notes Garza’s long criminal history, including an attempted murder conviction for stabbing a man when he was a teenager, which, at the time, he showed no remorse for.
“If the evidence Applicant has now presented is enough to entitle this gang-leading, life-long criminal, murderer of six to a new punishment hearing, it is hard to imagine it being insufficient in any case,” the dissenting opinion stated.
After receiving the high court’s ruling, Hidalgo County District Attorney Ricardo Rodriguez Jr. said his office’s first priority is to track down the victims’ families and explain the ruling to them as well as consult with them on how his office should move forward.
Additionally, Rodriguez said that his staff are exploring all other avenues available in the courts to address the ruling, including an appeal.
But as of now, it is simply too soon to say whether his office will seek the death penalty.
Garza’s lead counsel was attorney Ralph R. Martinez and his co-counsel was Librado “Keno” Vasquez, who is now a state district judge.
That ruling noted that Vasquez was appointed to assist Martinez late in the case and that he had a minimal role in representing Garza.
The ruling mainly addresses Martinez, who was not qualified to represent capital murder defendants at the time of the trial.
In capital murder trials that go to a sentencing phase, the mitigation investigation is critical to a person facing death.
The results of that investigation can be the difference between life and death.
And the high court found that Martinez “delegated his duty to investigate” to Garza’s mother, “who assisted counsel by calling individuals, taking counsel to their homes to talk with them, or arranging for these individuals to meet counsel at a designated location,” the ruling stated.
Garza’s mother would set up group meetings between his lead attorney and family members at a hotel.
“Applicant asserts that his attorneys did not try to find any witnesses on their own and did not ask Applicant or the other witnesses about sensitive and potentially embarrassing information, such as his mother’s pregnancy with him, substance abuse, or physical and sexual abuse within the family. Consequently, counsel learned nothing about these matters, and the minimal amount of relevant information counsel did obtain was superficial,” the ruling stated.
That ruling also explains how Garza suffered trauma from witnessing at 10 years old a murder of a family friend, which the jury was unable to hear about because the judge at the time sustained hearsay objections on the admission of this testimony from that victim’s widow.
The court also found that his attorneys never hired a mitigation specialist to investigate; never requested available court funding to obtain an investigator; never retained a mental health expert to screen for possible mental disorders or impairments and conduct a detailed life-history investigation; and never gathered basic social history documents like educational, employment, medical and juvenile records that would reveal repeated childhood exposure to trauma and provide evidence of mental health disorders.
“Applicant argues that counsel did not discover that Applicant was repeatedly exposed to trauma and suffers from mental health disorders, nor did he learn about Applicant’s extended family’s dysfunction because of his inadequate mitigation investigation. He asserts this dysfunction was due to widespread substance abuse, violent conduct, and family members’ involvement in drug trafficking,” the ruling stated.
That document also says that lead counsel Martinez never reached out to a handful of psychiatrists who would have been able to testify on Garza’s mental health, as well as to tell the jury that he suffered from Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.
All of these failures — despite clear aggravating evidence — warrant a new punishment trial, though the high criminal court did say it was a “close” case.
“But we think that the habeas mitigation evidence would have provided jurors with important context about Applicant’s life that trial counsel failed to present and that would have drawn a considerably different picture for the jury of Applicant’s childhood and mental health than what it was presented with at trial,” the ruling stated.
The high court denied all of his other ineffective assistance claims.
Last year, another man convicted in the case and sentenced to death also received a favorable court ruling, though he remains on death row.
A federal magistrate judge ruled in January 2020 that 41-year-old Rodolfo Alvarez Medrano’s case must be re-opened in state court so that he can challenge the state’s “gang expert,” who has since been stripped of his law enforcement license after being convicted of abuse of official capacity and being arrested for having oral sex with a woman in custody for robbery.
That appeal is to challenge a future dangerousness determination in his death sentence.
Future dangerousness must be considered in death sentences and in Medrano’s case, the jury determined he was a continuing threat to society.
Medrano contends that the convicted “gang expert” contributed to that determination and that his testimony was false as to his credentials, qualifications, training, his testimony’s substance and that it exaggerated his culpability.
Medrano provided the weapons for the deadly robbery but was not present during the killings.
Neither was Garza, who dropped the men off and picked them up after they had killed the six victims.
The remaining people convicted in the case are still in prison.
Marcial Bocanegra, 43, is serving 35 years in prison. Bocanegra is eligible for parole but is projected to be release in 2038.
Juan Cordova, 52, is serving 25 years in prison. Cordova is eligible for parole but his projected release date is in 2028.
Jorge Martinez was sentenced to 99 years in the case.
However, his status isn’t immediately clear.
He does not come up in an inmate search on the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s website.
