DA urges new term for inmate
The Harris County District Attorney’s Office has asked Texas’ highestranking criminal judges to consider a new punishment for Raymond George Riles, the state’s longest-serving inmate awaiting execution, for the 1974 murder of a Houston man.
The former trucker, now 70, has been locked up for more than 40 years. But for decades, Riles — convicted in 1976 of capital murder — has been considered mentally ill and incompetent for execution, and no date has been set recently. His lawyers and prosecutors now agree that the Court of Criminal Appeals should let Riles have a second chance at a punishment hearing.
In a brief, District Attorney Kim Ogg outlined her reasoning. Sentencing for capital crimes, she said, has changed since Riles’ conviction. Juries —
prompted by the so-called Penry claim set through a U.S. Supreme Court precedent — are now asked to weigh mitigating evidence, such as an offender’s childhood trauma, brain injuries or mental illness, into the punishment.
“In 1976, Riles’ capital murder jury was not given this opportunity,” Ogg said in a statement.
Riles, then 24, and an accomplice, Herbert Washington, shot and killed a used car dealer in Houston’s Northside neighborhood. The duo confronted the victim, 31-year-old John Thomas Henry, over the condition of a car and shot him while demanding money back, authorities said.
Riles pocketed $42 from the robbery.
Washington, also sentenced to death, had his sentence overturned, and he pleaded guilty to two related charges.
“Our prosecutors notified the crime victim’s son,” Ogg said in the statement. “These cases are heartbreaking because the process takes so long that laws can and sometimes do change, and it just prolongs justice and healing for the families of the dead.”
The brief, published Friday, concludes with Ogg asking that a new punishment hearing take place and for a jury to take the new evidence into account. The outcome could lead to a jury sticking to the death penalty or determining a number of years of imprisonment.
Defense attorneys for Riles argue that mitigating evidence would include “serious mental illness since childhood.”
“Mr. Riles’ mental illness is one of the ‘diverse frailties of humankind’ that a jury must be permitted to weigh when deciding whether to impose the ultimate punishment,” lawyer Jim Marcus of the University of Texas at Austin School of Law said in a statement.
Marcus and co-counsel Thea Posel, also with the university, said Riles has been treated with “heavy antipsychotic drugs” over the past four decades and that he had multiple trips between death row and the psychiatric hospital.
Unhinged antics were documented in the initial trial, in which Riles tore off a door jamb, jumped on the defense table and screamed that the judge and prosecutors were “mad dogs.”
On another occasion, he shouted religious scripture: “Woe be to unjust judges.” He was barred from the courtroom during most of the trial.
Riles had the death sentence reversed on appeal in 1978, but a jury again found him guilty and ordered him to be executed. He made notoriety again in 1985 when he set himself on fire in his cell while reciting religious chants. He suffered burns to about 30 percent of his body.
Early in his incarceration, Riles said he could no longer live under the mental stress prompted by death row and asked that the courts set him free or execute him.
“We suffer and we eventually end up executed anyway,” Riles told reporters in 1986. “This is not living at all.”
He was nearly executed by lethal injection that year and got as far as ordering his last meal. A stay prevented the execution hours before it was to happen.
Ogg’s 17-page document also cites another recent instance in which the Penry claim was used — with success. A state court, citing inadequate jury instructions, in 2019 overturned the death sentence for another longtime inmate, Cesar Fierro, in the 1980 killing of an El Paso man. Fierro was instead sentenced to life in prison.