HOUSTON — A Texas man is facing execution Wednesday for the strangling and stabbing death of a young North Texas mother more than 20 years ago.
Moises Sandoval Mendoza was condemned for the March 2004 killing of 20-year-old Rachelle O’Neil Tolleson. Prosecutors say Mendoza took Tolleson from her home in Farmersville, leaving her 6-month-old daughter alone. The infant was found cold and wet but safe the next day by Tolleson’s mother. Tolleson’s body was found six days later near a creek.
Mendoza, 41, was scheduled to receive a lethal injection Wednesday evening at the state penitentiary in Huntsville.
Evidence in Mendoza’s case showed he also burned Tolleson’s body to hide his fingerprints. Dental records were used to identify her, according to investigators.
Mendoza’s lawyers have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the scheduled execution after lower courts previously rejected his petitions for a stay. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Monday denied Mendoza’s request to commute his death sentence to a lesser penalty.
In their petition before the Supreme Court, Mendoza’s attorneys said he was prevented by lower courts from arguing that he had been denied effective assistance of counsel earlier in the appeals process.
Mendoza’s lawyers allege that a previous appeals attorney, as well as his trial lawyer, had failed to challenge critical testimony by a detention officer, Robert Hinton. That testimony was used by prosecutors to persuade jurors that Mendoza would be a future danger to society — a legal finding needed to secure a death sentence in Texas.
Mendoza’s lawyers allege the officer, who worked in the county jail where the inmate was being held after his arrest, gave false testimony that Mendoza had started a fight with another inmate. Mendoza’s lawyers say the other inmate now claims in an affidavit that he believed detention officers wanted him to start the fight, and he was later rewarded for it.
“There is no doubt the jury was listening. During its deliberations, the jury specifically asked about Mendoza’s ‘criminal acts while in jail,’ including the ‘assault on other inmate,’” Mendoza’s lawyers said in their petition to the Supreme Court. “As evidenced by the jury’s notes, there is a reasonable probability that trial counsel’s error in failing to investigate Hinton’s testimony affected the result.”
But the Texas Attorney General’s Office told the Supreme Court that Mendoza’s claim of ineffective assistance of counsel has already been found by a lower federal court to be “meritless and insubstantial.”
Even if the detention officer’s testimony were eliminated, the jury heard substantial evidence regarding Mendoza’s future dangerousness and his long history of violence, especially against women, including physically attacking his mother and sister and sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl, according to the attorney general’s office.
“Finally, given the extreme delay in this two-decade-old case, the public interest weighs heavily against a stay. The State and crime victims have a ’powerful and legitimate interest in punishing the guilty,’” the attorney general’s office said in its petition.
Authorities said that in the days before the killing, Mendoza had attended a party at Tolleson’s home in Farmersville, about 45 miles (72 kilometers) northeast of Dallas. On the day her body was found, Mendoza told a friend about the killing. The friend called police and Mendoza was arrested.
Mendoza confessed to police but couldn’t give detectives a reason for his actions, authorities said. He told investigators he repeatedly choked Tolleson, sexually assaulted her and dragged her body to a field, where he choked her again and then stabbed her in the throat. He later moved her body to a more remote location and burned it.
If the execution is carried out, Mendoza would be the third inmate put to death this year in Texas, historically the nation’s busiest capital punishment state, and the 13th in the U.S.
On Thursday, Alabama planned to execute James Osgood for the 2010 rape and murder of a woman.
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