Avila, a 40-year-old death row inmate in Texas, was supposed to be executed by lethal injection on January 15, 2014. He owes the past six weeks of his life to a groundbreaking new Texas law, the only one of its kind in the nation, which recognizes that science can get it wrong.
The crime that Avila was convicted of, and that he has steadfastly claimed he didn’t commit, is truly difficult to fathom: the murder of a 19-month-old boy. On the night of March 29, 2000, Avila, then 27, was babysitting his girlfriend’s two sons, 19-month-old Nicholas and 4-year-old Dylan. Avila told police that he’d been watching a basketball game in another room when Dylan, visibly scared, told him from the hall that Nicholas wasn’t breathing. Avila ran to the back bedroom where the brothers had been playing alone and found the toddler lying on the floor, next to a child-sized bed. He carried the boy to the living room and called 911. The operator walked him through CPR. It didn’t work. Nicholas died on his living room floor.
Dylan told investigators that he and Nicholas had been roughhousing when Nicholas stopped breathing; Avila was not in the room. Police and doctors, however, had an alternate version of what happened, informed by a large bruise on Nicholas’s torso and by his devastating and irreparable internal injuries, so severe that his organs were ripped from his spine, his pancreas ruptured and his colon torn.
They believed that Avila intentionally, maliciously stomped on the toddler’s stomach. Just over a year later, Avila was in court. The trial took only three and a half days; he was convicted of murder and, on July 19, 2001, was sentenced to death.i can see where it was possible if the med examiner was correct about the tearing of organs, it would indicate violent altercation.
Avila had supposedly confessed to the crime. In his first statement to police, Avila said that he’d been in another room when Dylan told him that Nicholas was hurt. But in a second, much-contested statement, he allegedly admitted that he was jealous of the little boy and that he stomped on him in a rage: “I saw him laying on the floor,” the second statement reads. “I don't know what came over me, but I walked over to him and stamped on him with my right foot.”
Avila claims that the detective who took both statements made up the second, and that he only signed it because the detective told him it was a “clarification” of the first. “He didn’t realize until after that it contained this very incorrect story,” said his lawyer, Cathryn Crawford of the Texas Defender Service; Avila testified as much in court. Notably, the second statement was not recorded, while the first was, and it was only signed by Avila, whereas he initialed all of the paragraphs in the first.
i just to believe he was jealous of a baby and the mom was not aware at some point, this is Texas given his surname he's presumably Hispanic, and ripe for railroading, Texas does have a rather large rate of executions that Perry and the state seem to be proud of
regardless of how many were innocent.
The medical examiner and pediatrician who examined Nicholas didn’t know what forensic pathologists, a physicist, and a biomechanical engineer would later find: A child, even a 40-pound 4-year-old, jumping directly on to the abdomen of a 19-month-old could have most certainly inflicted the kinds of injuries that killed Nicholas.
As forensic pathologist John Plunkett explained in an April 2013 affidavit, few scientists at the time were capable of understanding the biomechanics involved in Nicholas’s death, in part because little research had been done on these kinds of injuries. Plunkett said it was imperative that a qualified biomechanical engineer or physicist perform the necessary experiments to investigate Nicholas’s injuries.
So Avila’s legal team found someone to do just that. In May 2013, biomechanical engineer Chris Van Ee conducted an experiment envisioning what could have happened if Dylan had jumped on Nicholas from a height of 18 inches – the same height as the small bed next to which Nicholas was found lying unresponsive. Van Ee, summing up his conclusion in a report that accompanied Avila’s writ, found that a child of Dylan’s size jumping from that height could produce a force as great as 400 to 500 pounds.
it was a Blessing he escaped the Texas slaughter house rules of justice, wonder how many other cases of child brutality could and will be re-examined, not holding out for that but in light of the new forensic evidence who knows?
