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An appellate court on Oct. 12 has shot down a ruling that would have allowed a 57-year-old Alamo man serving life in prison for a brutal stabbing death in 2001 to have DNA retested in the case.
The 13th Court of Appeals reversed state District Judge Mario E. Ramirez’s 2021 ruling that granted post-conviction DNA testing in Gustavo Mireles’ case.
A jury convicted Mireles on Aug. 14, 2002 of fatally stabbing Mary Jane Rebollar 46 times on June 23, 2001.
Her body was found in a red and white Chevrolet pickup truck on a dirt road by a sugarcane field near Alamo.
Mireles has maintained his innocence since his arrest and never confessed.
The only physical evidence used to convict Mireles included two blood patterns on the truck’s passenger side door, blood on Rebollar’s pants and a pubic hair found inside her purse.
Appellate attorneys with the Hidalgo County District Attorney’s Office previously said all of those samples included Mireles’ DNA.
The 13th Court of Appeals agreed.
“Here, the trial court found, among other things, that all items that Mireles requested to be DNA tested were ‘not previously subjected to DNA testing.’ However, the evidence presented at trial showed that several items had previously been tested, and Mireles’s DNA was found on several items, which connected him to the offense,” the ruling stated.
Those items included the blood on the pants, the public hairs and the blood stains and the truck, according to the ruling.
“Thus, the trial court’s finding that these exhibits had not been previously tested is contradicted and not supported by the record,” the ruling stated.
The appellate court found that it would be improbable that new DNA testing would exclude Mireles.
The ruling also said that Ramirez, the state district judge, had granted Mireles’ request to retest four pubic hairs. The state had argued that those hairs contained no biological material that is suitable for retesting. “We agree with the State. At the hearing, no one stated that these three hairs were suitable for retesting,” the ruling stated.
There was also testimony that the Texas Department of Public Safety, which has a lab in Weslaco, could decline to retest any evidence that “was not stored in some place that’s not air-conditioned in south Texas.”
That’s because heat and humidity degrades DNA over time and these particular hairs were not stored in an air-conditioned environment.
“By its second, third, and fourth issues, the State contends that Mireles failed to establish by a preponderance of the evidence that he would not have been convicted if exculpatory results had been obtained through DNA testing of items not previously subjected to DNA testing, items previously tested but not linked to Mireles, and items previously tested where no DNA profile was found,” the ruling stated.
The appellate court found that the pubic hairs and blood found at the crime scene matched Mireles and concluded that Ramirez erred by granting the retesting. The court also found Mireles failed to show that he would be exonerated if DNA from another donor were found on items not previously tested, on items previously tested that weren’t linked to Mireles, and on items where no DNA profile was found.
Mireles’ attorneys had argued that retesting the DNA evidence would show Mireles wasn’t at the crime scene.
He had been at a bar where Rebollar was on the night of her murder.
The attorneys also argued the DPS crime lab, which was in McAllen at the time, didn’t use the FBI’s newest testing standard in 2001 and said much of the DNA evidence didn’t return results because of how it was tested.
That crime lab was later shut down for faulty testing in sexual assault kits, which happened around the same time the DNA in Mireles’ case was also tested there.
Mireles’ appeal also suggested his blood may have been cross-contaminated, claiming the test tube containing his sample was missing one-fourth of the blood it was supposed to have and that the evidence bag it was in was open.
Fingernail scrapings were also called into question.
They were taken from Rebollar, who had extensive defense wounds, and the DNA taken from them only matched a woman — not a man.
Mireles’ appeal also suggested Rebollar’s real killers were a man named Jesus Arce and/or a woman named Delia Rodriguez.
Rebollar had been in a relationship with Arce and had recently befriended Rodriguez before her death.
The jury during Mireles’ trial never heard that Arce and Rodriguez had a relationship that Rebollar did not know about.
Arce was murdered in Lubbock in 2015.
