Huntsville, Texas – A man from Texas condemned by strangle and fatally stabbed a young mother more than 20 years ago was executed Wednesday night.
Moises Sandoval Mendoza received a lethal injection in the state prison in Huntsville and was declared dead at 6:40 pm, authorities said. He was convicted of the murder of March 2004 of Rachelle O’Neil Tolleson, 20.
Prosecutors say that Mendoza, 41, took Tolleson from his home in northern Texas, leaving his 6 -month -old daughter alone. The baby was found cold and humid but surely the next day by Tolleson’s mother. Tolleson’s body was discovered six days later, left in a field near a stream.
The evidence in the case of Mendoza showed that he also burned Tolleson’s body to hide his digital footprints. Dental records were used to identify it, according to the researchers.
Earlier on Wednesday, the United States Supreme Court issued an order that rejected all Mendoza appeals to block lethal injection of the procedure. The lower courts had previously rejected their requests for a stay. The Board of Perdons and Paroles de Texas denied on Monday Mendoza’s request to travel its death sentence to a minor penalty.
In his request before the Supreme Court, Mendoza’s lawyers said the lower courts prevented him from arguing that he had denied the effective assistance of lawyers before in the appeal process.
Mendoza’s lawyers claim that a previous appeal lawyer, as well as his litigating lawyer, had not imposed critical testimony from a detention officer, Robert Hinton. Prosecutors used this testimony to convince the jury that Mendoza would be a future danger to society, a necessary legal finding to ensure a death sentence in Texas.
Mendoza’s lawyers claim that the officer, who worked in the county prison, where he was arrested in the inmate after his arrest, gave a false testimony that Mendoza had begun a fight with another inmate. Mendoza’s lawyers say that the other inmate now affirms in an affidavit that he believed that the arrest officers wanted him to begin the fight, and was then rewarded for it.
“There is no doubt that the jury was listening. During his deliberations, the jury specifically asked Mendoza’s ‘criminal acts while he was in jail’, including the ‘assault on another inmate'”, Mendoza’s lawyers said in his request to the Supreme Court. “As evidenced by the jury’s notes, there is a reasonable probability that the error of the trial lawyer does not investigate Hinton’s testimony affected the result.”
But Texas’ Attorney General’s office told the Supreme Court that Mendoza’s claim for ineffective assistance has already been found by a lower federal court as “without merit and insubstantial.”
Even if the testimony of the arrest officer was eliminated, the jury heard substantial evidence on Mendoza’s future danger and his long history of violence, especially against women, including physically attack by his mother and sister and sexually assaulting a 14 -year -old girl, according to the Office of the Attorney General.
“Finally, given the extreme delay in this case of two decades, the public interest weighs largely against a stay. The victims of the State and the crime have a” powerful and legitimate interest in punishing the culprit, “said the office of the attorney general in his request.
The authorities said that in the days before the murder, Mendoza had attended a party at Tolleson’s house in Farmersville, about 45 miles northeast of Dallas. The day his body was found, Mendoza told a friend about the murder. The friend called the Police and Mendoza was arrested.
Mendoza confessed to the police, but could not give the detectives a reason for their actions, authorities said. He told the researchers that he repeatedly choked Tolleson, sexually assaulted her and dragged her body to a field, where she drowned her again and then stabbed her in her throat. Later he moved his body to a more remote location and burned it.
If the execution is carried out, Mendoza would be the third inmate executed this year in Texas, historically the most busy state of capital punishment in the nation and 13 in the United States
On Thursday, Alabama planned to execute James Osgood for the 2010 rape and the murder of a woman.
