A district attorney in Texas, convinced that the evidence that sent Areli Escobar to death row was flawed, is supporting his request for a new trial.
WASHINGTON — A state judge in Texas ruled that Areli Escobar, a death row inmate there, had been convicted based on junk science produced by a police DNA lab so riddled with problems that it had to be shut down.
“It would be shocking to the conscience to uphold the conviction of Mr. Escobar,” Judge David Wahlberg of the Travis County District Court wrote in an 86-page decision in 2020. “Mr. Escobar’s trial was fundamentally unfair.”
José P. Garza, the district attorney whose office had obtained the conviction, said his initial impulse was to dig in and continue to defend it.
“But as more evidence came to light about how flawed the evidence the jury relied upon was, we had to re-evaluate that position,” he said. “Although it is the instinct of every district attorney to defend convictions, our job is to see that justice is done, and we take that very seriously.”
When the case reached the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest court for criminal matters, Mr. Garza did something surprising. He joined lawyers for Mr. Escobar in urging the court to order a new trial, one that would exclude the evidence he had come to doubt. But the appeals court upheld Mr. Escobar’s conviction this year in a short unsigned opinion that did not acknowledge the prosecution’s changed position.
On Friday, the Supreme Court is scheduled to consider whether to take up Mr. Escobar’s appeal. Mr. Garza’s office has once again filed a brief supporting the inmate whom it had sent to death row.
“You have both the state and the defense agreeing that the evidence that the jury relied upon to sentence a person to death was flawed,” Mr. Garza said. “I hope at the very least that they take that seriously.”
Mr. Escobar was convicted in 2011 of murdering Bianca Maldonado Hernandez, who lived in the same apartment complex. The prosecution presented some circumstantial evidence, including cell tower records and a partial fingerprint, but the centerpiece of its case was evidence from the Austin Police Department’s DNA lab.
At a later court hearing on a challenge to Mr. Escobar’s conviction, a juror said that the DNA evidence had been crucial.
“I was sitting on the fence, if you will, as to whether he was guilty or not guilty all the way up to when the DNA evidence was submitted to the jury and, for me, that was the sealing factor,” the juror said.
Five years after Mr. Escobar’s trial, an audit by the Texas Forensic Science Commission revealed shortcomings in the DNA lab’s work, including failures to follow scientific protocols, bias, contaminated samples and inadequate training. The lab suspended its operations, and it has never reopened.
A 2016 letter to the Austin City Council from criminal judges in Travis County said that “the problems discovered raise questions about every determination made by the lab.”
Given all of this, Judge Wahlberg found in 2020, the DNA evidence in Mr. Escobar’s case was “false, misleading and unreliable.”
“Without the DNA evidence,” Judge Wahlberg wrote, “the remaining evidence relied on by the state was circumstantial and weak and would not have supported a conviction for capital murder.”
The Texas appeals court took the opposite view, saying the remaining evidence was sufficient to support the conviction notwithstanding “the general deficiencies discovered” by the commission’s audit.
Daniel Woofter, one of Mr. Escobar’s lawyers, said the appeals court had not bothered to disclose a key fact. “The prosecutors themselves won’t stand behind their conviction anymore,” he said.
After the appeals court ruled, Mr. Garza’s office filed one more brief, gently suggesting that the judges might have overlooked the reality that all concerned — the trial judge, the defense and the prosecution — agreed that Mr. Escobar was entitled to a new trial.
“The possibility that the state failed to have clearly indicated its change in position has come to its attention because this court did not acknowledge in its order, as is usual practice, that the state had conceded that applicant was entitled to relief,” the brief said. The court denied the request for reconsideration without giving a reason.
Ben Wolff, the director of the state’s Office of Capital and Forensic Writs, a public defender’s office that represents Mr. Escobar, said Mr. Garza deserved praise for his willingness to keep an open mind.
“Many other prosecutors would have just continued to robotically defend the conviction,” Mr. Wolff said. “But to their credit, the Travis County D.A.’s office carefully reviewed the trial court opinion and decided that their office had been wrong.”
In his Supreme Court brief in the case, Escobar v. Texas, No. 21-1601, Mr. Garza said the prosecution’s views should count.
“In refusing to acknowledge the state’s admission of error,” he wrote, the state appeals court “undermined the district attorney’s historical role in the criminal justice system and failed to remedy the federal due process violation that both parties and the district court have agreed occurred.”
In an interview, Mr. Garza said the question for the justices was straightforward.
“If you look at the trial record carefully, there can be no question that the state relied heavily upon the DNA evidence,” he said. “And then when you look at the DNA evidence in this case and the history of the lab that produced it, there can be no question that that evidence is suspect at the very least.”
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