EDINBURG — State prosecutors are fighting attempts to have nearly two dozen pieces of DNA evidence retested in a case that saw a man convicted of murder at around the same time that a local crime lab was forced to shut down due to serious errors and irregularities.
In 2002, a jury convicted Gustavo Mireles and sentenced him to life in prison for the murder of Mary Jane Rebollar, a woman he had met briefly at a Donna bar.
But since the beginning, Mireles has maintained his innocence.
He had never met Rebollar before that night in June 2001, when he stopped at the bar to watch a soccer game before heading off to haul agricultural products in Corpus Christi the next morning.
Rebollar had gone to the bar with a friend named Delia Rodriguez. Two days later, Rebollar’s body was found inside her pickup truck in a field near Alamo.
Her death had been violent.
She had suffered more than 40 stab wounds from a screwdriver-type weapon, according to an investigation by Actual Innocence Review, a nonprofit organization that helps indigent defendants convicted of felonies pursue exoneration.
Investigators recovered a host of evidence from the crime scene, including several items of bloodstained clothing, multiple strands of hair, samples of blood taken from her vehicle, and scrapings taken from underneath Rebollar’s fingernails.
But a cloud has long hung over the integrity of the investigation that led to Mireles’ conviction — from questions over actions by investigators, to the DNA evidence itself.
That evidence was tested by a Texas Department of Public Safety crime lab which was then located in McAllen.
That lab, however, was shut down in 2003 after an internal audit found gross errors, including the mishandling of evidence. The lab’s mismanagement and mishandling impacted hundreds of cases, and several personnel were subsequently suspended.
The McAllen lab had also failed to follow FBI standards when performing tests on the evidence.
DPS later shut down the McAllen lab permanently and replaced it with the Weslaco crime lab, which remains in operation today.
It’s largely as a result of the crime lab brouhaha, however, that Mireles was successfully able to argue to have the evidence in his case retested.
Last October, the trial court granted his request to retest some 20 specific pieces of evidence, but state prosecutors appealed the decision, arguing that retesting would have little probative value.
That assertion comes even after prosecutors admitted in court Wednesday that — aside from the DNA evidence — the case against Mireles is entirely circumstantial.
“If you take all the DNA out, then all you have is an eyewitness?” asked Jaime Tijerina, the Place 4 justice on the 13th Court of Appeals.
Tijerina further characterized the witness’ identification of Mireles as the perpetrator as “weak at best.”
“We would agree that our case is not beyond reasonable doubt … without the DNA,” Michael Morris, an appellate attorney with the Hidalgo County District Attorney’s Office, said to the three justices Wednesday morning.
Both prosecutors and Mireles’ defense attorneys from the Innocence Project of Texas submitted lengthy briefs to support why the appellate court should rule in their favor.
But during oral arguments, the back-and-forth between the justices and the attorneys focused largely on the complex technical minutiae surrounding the DNA testing itself.
When the evidence was tested 20 years ago, the lab used only nine so-called “loci” or markers on the samples, even though technology at the time allowed for more detailed testing with 13 markers.
Today’s even more advanced technology would allow for more specific testing yet at 23 markers.
Justice Tijerina remarked that four pieces of evidence appeared to match Mireles — putting the likelihood of them matching another person at one in over 147 billion.
The judge asked how more delicate retesting would change such an astronomical probability in Mireles’ favor. He asked Mireles’ attorneys to quantify it in similar terms.
“I think that’s the crux … it’s not that the statistic needs to be lowered, it’s that the statistic was incorrect,” replied Chase Baumgartner, one of Mireles’ attorneys.
Tijerina also expressed concern over how Mireles’ case could open the floodgates to scores more defendants seeking to overturn their convictions based on DNA evidence that had similarly been tested with more primitive methods.
“In your brief, you ask us to follow the spirit of the law. … How far are you asking us to go?” Tijerina asked.
“By opening the floodgates to one does not open the floodgates to all,” Baumgartner replied, adding that most convictions are supported by a “mountain of evidence” in addition to DNA evidence.
But no such mountain exists in Mireles’ case.
In his case, the only thing that does exist is DNA evidence that was, in some cases, improperly stored or improperly tested.
“For 20 years, we’ve been dealing with this,” said Mireles’ sister, Leonor Moreno. “And it is frustrating. It’s frustrating that you discover all this evidence that exonerates my brother.”
Moreno and several other family members attended Wednesday’s appellate hearing hoping to find relief for a family member they are certain was wrongly convicted.
But, finding numerous pieces of exculpatory evidence has been like shouting into the void.
For years, no one was willing to listen to Moreno or her brother, who has educated himself on the law while he has been behind bars.
“We bought him the law books. … Everything that he’s learned through the filings is because he read the law books,” Moreno said.
Mireles spent years fighting his appeal pro se — on his own, without the aid of an attorney — until the Innocence Project of Texas decided to take on his case.
Throughout that time, Moreno had been doing what she could to help him — gathering trial transcripts, obtaining copies of emails between investigators and forensic analysts. Digging for every scrap of evidence she could.
The Actual Innocence Review eventually took an interest, too.
Through their investigation, they uncovered that Rodriguez, the woman who had been at the bar with Rebollar, had been mistress to Rebollar’s boyfriend, a man named Jesus Arce.
Rodriguez had left the bar early that night to go meet up with Arce.
Moreno said investigators initially suspected Arce of killing Rebollar. They even went as far as obtaining a warrant for his arrest.
“Arce was arrested originally for the murder of Mary Jane,” Moreno said.
But things took a turn when, during the arrest, investigators discovered 14,000 pounds of marijuana at Arce’s home.
Instead of facing murder charges, he was handed off to the feds on drug charges, Moreno said.
The Actual Innocence Review’s investigation revealed other discrepancies in the investigation — things Moreno says keep her up at night crying in frustration.
“Could you imagine knowing this information? I mean, you want to tell the world, ‘Look! Open the doors!” Moreno said.
“Why can’t there be a better system when you have documentation like this?” she asked.
Moreno was referring to the narrow scope to which her brother’s appeal has been limited.
The appeals court cannot look at things like fingerprints not matching her brother. It can’t look at things like Arce’s illicit relationship with Rebollar’s friend.
The only thing it can look at is the court record.
“An appeal of this nature, which is a direct appeal, is going to be confined by what we call the records,” explained Jessi Freud, another attorney with the Innocence Project of Texas who is representing Mireles.
In this case, those records include the transcript of Mireles’ so-called “Chapter 64” hearing to have the DNA retested, and the court clerk’s record.
“And so that’s why some other peripheral issues that are outside those two very narrow records don’t get entertained,” Freud said.
It could be a year or more before the appellate court makes a decision in Mireles’ case.
Should the court rule in Mireles’ favor, prosecutors might choose to continue their fight to prevent the DNA retesting all the way to the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals.
Moreno plans to be by her brother’s side until the end.
“I won’t stop. Gus is innocent,” she said.
