[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, OHIO, MO.

[Rick Halperin]

April 5



TEXAS----impending execution

South Texas man set to die said he drank victim's blood


Pablo Lucio Vasquez remembered getting drunk and high on an April evening in 
1998 before leaving a party with his 15-year-old cousin and his cousin's 
12-year-old friend.

Vasquez later would tell detectives that as they reached a wooden shed, he 
started hearing voices telling him to kill the younger boy, David Cardenas. So 
he hit the 7th-grader in the head from behind with a pipe, cut his throat and 
lifted the still-conscious victim so blood would drip on the 20-year-old 
Vasquez's face.

"Something just told me to drink," Vasquez said in a videotaped statement to 
police in Donna, a small town in Texas' Rio Grande Valley.

"You drink what?" a detective asked. "His blood," Vasquez replied.

Vasquez, now 38, is set for lethal injection Wednesday for what police 
speculated at the time may have been an attempted satanic cult crime. Evidence 
of that nature, however, didn't surface at Vasquez's 1999 capital murder trial 
or in appeals, where courts as recent as last month rejected arguments that 
Vasquez was mentally ill and should be exempt from the death penalty.

His execution would be the 11th this year nationally and the 6th in Texas.

Vasquez's lawyer, James Keegan, has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the 
punishment so the justices can consider arguments that several potential jurors 
were excluded improperly at Vasquez's trial because they either were opposed to 
the death penalty or not comfortable making such a judgment.

A death sentence shouldn't be carried out if it was reached by a jury that 
rejected members "simply because they voiced general objections to the death 
penalty or expressed conscientious or religious scruples against its 
infliction," Keegan told the high court, which did not immediately rule on the 
appeal.

18 years ago this month, Cardenas, who lived with his sister about 5 miles from 
Donna, was spending the weekend with Vasquez's cousin, 15-year-old Andres 
Rafael Chapa. Both went to a party on April 18 and were seen rolling marijuana 
cigarettes; Vasquez also attended.

Police received an anonymous tip about the slaying that led them to Chapa and 
eventually to Vasquez, who was arrested in Conroe, a Houston suburb more than 
325 miles north of Donna. Authorities found the body - missing some limbs - 5 
days later under scraps of aluminum in a vacant field. A blood trail showed it 
was dragged to the site, including across a 4-lane main street in Donna.

"They decided they were going to try to take his head off with a shovel and 
didn't realize that it was a lot more difficult to cut someone's head off," 
Joseph Orendain, the lead trial prosecutor, recalled last week. "It was a 
mutilated body left behind. ... It was really horrendous."

Vasquez, who said he took a gold ring and necklace from Cardenas, told police 
that Chapa participated in trying to decapitate the boy. "The devil was telling 
me to take [the head] away from him," Vasquez said, adding that "it couldn't 
come off."

Chapa pleaded guilty to a murder charge for his involvement and is serving a 
35-year prison term. 3 other relatives of Chapa and Vasquez received probation 
and a small fine for helping cover up the slaying. 1 of them was deported to 
Guatemala.

Vasquez declined an interview request from The Associated Press as his 
execution date neared. His statement to police fueled speculation about 
satanism, but Orendain said he had no idea whether that connection could be 
made.

"He was really just a sociopath," Orendain said.

(source: Dallas Morning News)






OHIO:

Cleveland serial killer Anthony Sowell fights death sentence, Ohio Supreme 
Court to hear appeal----Sowell's attorney's to argue for a new trial

The Ohio Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Tuesday for a new trial for 
condemned serial killer Anthony Sowell, who killed 11 women and hid their 
bodies in and around his home.

Sowell, 56, was convicted and sentenced to death in 2011.

Sowell's new attorneys are fighting the death sentence for their client. They 
claimed that his original defense attorneys wasted time challenging the 
evidence against Sowell, when they should have focused on sparing him the death 
penalty, based on Sowell's chaotic childhood and background, ABC News reported.

Sowell's attorneys also said the judge in the case should not have closed a 
July 2010 hearing in which lawyers argued over a video of Sowell's police 
interview. In addition, they argued that the judge shouldn't have put the 
individual questioning of potential jurors off limits to the public, the 
Associated Press reported.

Sowell's victims were black, homeless, drug- or alcohol-addicted women, who 
ranged in age from 25 to 52; some of their families filed police reports, 
others were used to long unexplained absences and didn't bother, the Washington 
Post reported.

According to the authorities, he seemed harmless enough when he invited his 
victims inside and promised them a good time before raping and strangling them, 
the Post reported.

(source: newsnet5.com)






MISSOURI:

Appeals denied for Missouri man sentenced to death after videotaped attacks on 
women


The state Supreme Court has denied the appeals of a man sentenced to death for 
the videotaped May, 2006 murder of an Independence woman.

Richard Davis was convicted of the first-degree murder of Marsha Spicer of 
Independence, as well as multiple counts of assault, rape, and sodomy. Davis 
argued that his attorneys were ineffective in the witnesses they called to 
testify to his mental state, and in preparing him to testify in his trial.

The Supreme Court found that the lower courts were right to deny his appeals, 
and has denied his request for a new trial or penalty phase.

Davis and his then-girlfriend, Dena Riley, both pleaded guilty to a similar 
series of crimes in the murder of Michelle Huff-Ricci of Kansas City. Attacks 
on both women were videotaped, including the murder of Spicer.

Riley is serving life without parole at a state prison in Chillicothe.

(source: missourinet.com)