In Texas, a New Law Lets Defendants Fight Bad Science

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http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/02/in-texas-a-new-law-lets-defendants-fight-bad-science/283895/

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Rigoberto “Robert” Avila is supposed to be dead by now.

Avila, a 40-year-old death row inmate in Texas, was supposed to be executed by lethal injection on January 15, 2014. He owes the past six weeks of his life to a groundbreaking new Texas law, the only one of its kind in the nation, which recognizes that science can get it wrong.

The crime that Avila was convicted of, and that he has steadfastly claimed he didn’t commit, is truly difficult to fathom: the murder of a 19-month-old boy. On the night of March 29, 2000, Avila, then 27, was babysitting his girlfriend’s two sons, 19-month-old Nicholas and 4-year-old Dylan. Avila told police that he’d been watching a basketball game in another room when Dylan, visibly scared, told him from the hall that Nicholas wasn’t breathing. Avila ran to the back bedroom where the brothers had been playing alone and found the toddler lying on the floor, next to a child-sized bed. He carried the boy to the living room and called 911. The operator walked him through CPR. It didn’t work. Nicholas died on his living room floor.

Dylan told investigators that he and Nicholas had been roughhousing when Nicholas stopped breathing; Avila was not in the room. Police and doctors, however, had an alternate version of what happened, informed by a large bruise on Nicholas’s torso and by his devastating and irreparable internal injuries, so severe that his organs were ripped from his spine, his pancreas ruptured and his colon torn. They believed that Avila intentionally, maliciously stomped on the toddler’s stomach. Just over a year later, Avila was in court. The trial took only three and a half days; he was convicted of murder and, on July 19, 2001, was sentenced to death.

There were two reasons jury believed that Avila—a Naval veteran with no history of violence or criminal background—was capable of stomping a 19-month-old child to death. The first was that Avila had supposedly confessed to the crime. In his first statement to police, Avila said that he’d been in another room when Dylan told him that Nicholas was hurt. But in a second, much-contested statement, he allegedly admitted that he was jealous of the little boy and that he stomped on him in a rage: “I saw him laying on the floor,” the second statement reads. “I don't know what came over me, but I walked over to him and stamped on him with my right foot.” Avila claims that the detective who took both statements made up the second, and that he only signed it because the detective told him it was a “clarification” of the first. “He didn’t realize until after that it contained this very incorrect story,” said his lawyer, Cathryn Crawford of the Texas Defender Service; Avila testified as much in court. Notably, the second statement was not recorded, while the first was, and it was only signed by Avila, whereas he initialed all of the paragraphs in the first.