Charges Dropped; Death Row Prisoner to Go Free

HOUSTON —  A Mexican immigrant who was on death row in Texas for nearly 14 years after being convicted of killing a policeman was to be freed after all charges against him were dropped Tuesday.

Harris County Dist. Atty. Johnny Holmes told reporters that a decision Monday by Judge Frank Maloney to throw out several key prosecution witnesses for lack of credibility left the state without a case against Ricardo Aldape Guerra.

“Since the court suppressed the identification of six witnesses of Guerra as the shooter, we do not think we should go forward with the remaining evidence. It’s a waste of time, effort and energy,” Holmes said.

A spokesman for the Mexican government said Aldape Guerra, now 34, was in Harris County Jail awaiting his release and was expected to be flown Tuesday night to his hometown of Monterrey on a plane sent by the governor of the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon.

Aldape Guerra came to the United States illegally in 1982 to find work, but soon found himself in a legal nightmare.

He was convicted in October 1982 of shooting to death Houston police officer James Harris during a routine traffic stop in July 1982. He was sentenced to death, but maintained that the killer was Roberto Carrasco Flores, a passenger in his car who died later that day in a shootout with police.

In 1994, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt threw out the conviction and ordered a new trial because of police and prosecutorial misconduct. He charged that police and prosecutors, in their zeal to prosecute an alleged cop killer, had become “merchants of chaos” by intimidating witnesses into accusing Aldape Guerra and manipulating evidence to assure a conviction.

The ruling was upheld in August by the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

On Monday, Maloney agreed with the federal courts.