The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals halted the execution of Ramiro Gonzales Monday, two days before he was scheduled to die by lethal injection.
Gonzales, 39, was sentenced to death for kidnapping, raping and killing Bridget Townsend when they were both 18 in Medina County. On Monday, the court said his sentence should be revisited after a state expert said he wrongly told jurors during the 2006 trial that people who commit a sexual assault would be very likely to do it again.
To hand down a death sentence after finding someone guilty of capital murder, jurors must find that the person will likely be a future danger. The only alternative sentence is life in prison without the possibility of parole.
In its ruling, the all-Republican court said it seemed the expert’s statements at trial on recidivism rates “were false and that that false testimony could have affected the jury’s answer to the future dangerousness question at punishment.”
Gonzales’ case will now go back to Medina County, where local officials will weigh the effect of the trial testimony. His guilt in Townsend’s murder is not in question, only his punishment of death over life in prison.
In 2001, Gonzales kidnapped Townsend after she intervened while he was trying to steal drugs at the home of her boyfriend and Gonzales’ dealer, according to court records. He raped her before fatally shooting her. The next year, after he pled guilty to the rape and kidnapping of another woman and received two life sentences, he confessed his guilt in Townsend’s murder and guided police to her remains.
At his trial for Townsend’s death, the defense did not push back when jurors weighed guilt or innocence, and he was quickly found guilty. When jurors were deciding his punishment, however, Medina County prosecutors brought forward Dr. Edward Gripon, a forensic psychiatrist.
“Regarding the likelihood of recidivism for sexual offenses, I testified that there is lots of data out there about the person who commits forcible rape and the likelihood that they will continue that. The percentages are way up in the eighty percentile or better,” Gripon wrote in a May report. “However, we now know this statistic to be inaccurate.”
In his new report, Gripon said that 80% number has been traced to a “bare assertion” in a psychology magazine from the 1980s, written without citations or data by someone without credentials. He said peer-reviewed statistical studies have instead shown the likelihood of committing new sexual offenses is much lower — especially when the offender is young, like Gonzales was.