Man executed amid last-minute appeals
With his final words, Alvin Braziel admitted guilt.
After a flurry of last-minute appeals, the 43-year-old met his end in the Huntsville death chamber at 7:19 p.m. Tuesday, a quarter-century after he forced Lora White to watch as he killed her husband before dragging her into the bushes and raping her.
“I would like to thank all those overseas, Italy and France, for their support for the death row prisoners,” he said, according to a prison spokesman. “I would also like to apologize to Lori for the second time for her husband dying at my hand.”
He took nine minutes to die. Barely an hour before his execution, Braziel’s attorneys begged a Texas appeals court to call off the Dallas County man’s date with death, alleging the state had just admitted to prosecutorial misconduct that occurred 17 years earlier.
Braziel was the 13th and final execution in Texas this year, but at 11 a.m. — seven hours before the planned death by lethal injection — state prosecutors reached out to Braziel’s attorneys with an admission.
They said they’d gotten a call the night before from Tom D’Amore, who prosecuted the case nearly two decades earlier. D’Amore allegedly confessed that, during the 2001 trial, fellow prosecutor George West implied he’d purposefully provoked the slain man’s wife into an emotional outburst on the stand when he showed her an autopsy photo of her husband.
At the time, Braziel’s attorneys moved for a mistrial — but the court turned it down after West said he wasn’t trying to get that response. After this week’s admission was laid out in court filings, Braziel’s attorneys on Tuesday asked the trial court to call off the execution. The trial court agreed — but only if the prosecutor would submit a sworn statement.
With the clock ticking down to 6 p.m., defense attorneys David Dow and Jeff Newberry filed a similar request with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals just before 5 p.m., in case they couldn’t get a sworn statement in time.
“The State only disclosed this information today,” the lawyers wrote. “Had trial counsel had made this disclosure as recently as a month ago, there would have been sufficient time to develop the claim.”
Yet, even after they managed to secure an emailed statement from D’Amore, the trial court rejected Braziel’s appeal just before 6 p.m., and the appeals court — over dissents from Judge Elsa Alcala and Judge Scott Walker — turned him down as well.
Calling it the sort of “unique and extraordinary” circumstances that should merit a stay, Alcala wrote that it was “wholly unrealistic and patently unreasonable” to expect defense lawyers to resolve unanswered questions so quickly.
“It is axiomatic that a death sentence is irreversible,” she wrote, “and no one could reasonably believe that it should be carried out with such serious allegations of possible prosecutorial misconduct pending.”
The last-minute legal wrangling came after decades of litigation and investigation. On the evening of Sept. 21, 1993, Lora and Douglas White went on an after-dinner walk on a jogging trail at a Dallasarea community college. Sometime after 8:45 p.m., a man emerged from the bushes, brandishing a gun and demanding money from the terrified newlyweds.
But the couple didn’t have cash, and their attacker instead forced them to their knees, according to court records. They started to pray — and their assailant mocked them.
“Where is your God at now?” he asked. Then, he shot Douglas in the head, kicked him and shot him in the chest, according to court records.
Lora heard the air rush out of her husband’s chest before the attacker dragged her back into the bushes and raped her while she prayed.
Afterward, he kissed her and told her she’d done “real good,” records show.
For years, the brutal crime at Mesquite’s Eastfield College went unsolved. Then in 2001, DNA testing matched evidence from Lora’s rape to a man already behind bars — convicted criminal Alvin Braziel.
Braziel was serving a five-year sentence for an unrelated sexual assault of a child when testing done at a Department of Public Safety lab in Garland flagged him as a possible match to the suspect who attacked Lora.
Ten days later, Braziel was indicted.
In a lineup, Lora picked out Braziel as the man who attacked her. But Braziel said he wasn’t there — though he couldn’t remember where he was that night, according to Dallas Morning News coverage of the trial.
In court, family and friends testified on his behalf, saying he was trustworthy and a good father. Prosecutors told the court about prior offenses, including a highspeed chase and a carjacking.
And, just before Lora’s dramatic outburst on the stand, West allegedly told his co-counsel, “Watch this.”
After seeing the morbid picture, Lora left the courtroom crying so loudly that jurors could still hear her inside. But, 17 years later, it was not her tears but those two words from the prosecutor that sparked the futile last-minute appeal.
When the jury convicted him in 2001, even his trial team admitted they weren’t surprised; attorney Richard Franklin said the evidence against him was “overwhelming.”
After he was sent to death row, his attorneys on appeal raised claims of sub-par representation earlier in the case, saying trial lawyers failed to bring up his abusive upbringing, family history of mental illness and childhood head injury as possible reasons to consider a life sentence instead of death.
The appeals attorneys also alleged that prosecutors withheld relevant evidence — including a police report — and that Braziel was denied due process when investigators used an “unduly suggestive” photo line-up to help the surviving victim identify him.
Days before his scheduled execution, his lawyers asked the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to consider whether he was too intellectually disabled to execute, but a day later the legal team withdrew their motion.
Texas has executed 13 men so far in 2018, more than any other state. There are six already scheduled to die in 2019.