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CCA Issues Stay for Jose Briseno

By standdown

"Texas inmate set to die next week wins reprieve," is the AP report via the Dallas Morning News. Jose Briseno, 51, was scheduled for lethal injection Tuesday for gunning down Dimmit County Sheriff Ben "Doc" Murray at the 68-year-old sheriff's home in Carizzo Springs, about 140 miles southwest of San Antonio. Briseno has been on death row for 17 years. The state's highest criminal court, acting on an appeal filed by Briseno's attorneys, agreed to look at whether the trial jury in Laredo deciding his punishment never received proper instructions about how to consider mitigating evidence of Briseno's unstable family, troubled background, limited intellectual ability and poverty. "The Texas courts have wrestled with this issue in numerous cases since 1989, when the Supreme Court first addressed this problem with the Texas capital sentencing procedure," Richard Burr, Briseno's lead lawyer, said...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on April 03, 2009 (boomark / email).