After 45 years on death row, inmate resentenced to life
Texas’ longest-serving death row prisoner was resentenced Wednesday to life in prison after prosecutors declined to pursue his execution in another trial, according to the Harris County District Attorney’s Office.
Raymond George Riles, now 71, spent 45 years awaiting the death penalty for the 1974 murder of a Houston man. The former trucker has, for decades, been considered mentally ill and incompetent for execution.
“Mr. Riles is too physically frail to withstand the rigors of a capital trial, and his mental illness legally precludes his execution,” said attorney Jim Marcus, of the Capital Punishment Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. “Today’s resentencing is an appropriate resolution of this case and concludes the more than three decades Mr. Riles has spent stuck in legal limbo.”
Marcus’ co-counsel also remarked on Riles’ ailing health: “‘Life,’ for Mr. Riles, indeed describes the sentence in this case,” attorney Thea Posel said.
The new sentence comes after the Harris County District Attorney’s Office in February asked the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for another punishment hearing in the 179th judicial district court. In April, the court granted Wednesday’s hearing before Judge Ana Martinez.
“Riles is incompetent and therefore can’t be executed,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said after the decision. “We will never forget John Henry, who was murdered so many years ago by Riles, and we believe justice would best be served by Riles spending the remainder of his life in custody of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.”
Riles was convicted in 1976 for the capital murder of John Thomas Henry, 31. Riles and an accomplice, Herbert Washington, shot and killed the used car dealer in Houston’s Northside neighborhood, confronting him over the condition of a car and demanding a refund, authorities said.
Then 24 years old, Riles walked away with $42 from the deadly encounter.
His original sentence was later reversed on appeal and, after declining a plea bargain, Marcus said, Riles was resentenced to death in 1978. Washington, also sentenced to death, had his punishment overturned and he pleaded guilty to two related charges.
Riles has been incarcerated for
47 years total, 45 of which have been on death row. He will be transferred to another Texas Department of Criminal Justice prison at a future date, Marcus said.
Ogg’s office Wednesday declined to pursue another death sentence during the resentencing hearing, and the judge opted for life in prison — the only other option in a capital murder case. The district attorney previously said she was seeking another punishment hearing for Riles because sentencing for capital crimes has changed since his 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.
That mitigating evidence, Riles’ defense attorneys argued, would include “serious mental illness since childhood.”
Marcus and Posel previously said that 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.
Some of his illness was 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 proceedings.
Riles in 1985 set fire to himself in his cell while reciting religious chants. He suffered burns to about 30 percent of his body.
Early in his incarceration, Riles also said he could no longer live under the mental stress prompted by death row and asked that the courts either set him free or execute him.
“We suffer and we eventually end up executed anyway,” Riles told reporters in 1985. “This is not living at all.”
He was nearly executed by lethal injection that year and even ordered his last meal. A stay hours before prevented the execution.