Sentence reconsidered for man on death row

Top Texas court tosses his punishment for conviction in 1976 Northside slaying

Texas’ highest criminal court this week tossed the sentence of the state’s longest-serving death row inmate, who spent more than four decades in a “legal limbo between life and death” because he was too mentally ill to execute, his attorneys said.

Raymond Riles, a now 70year-old former trucker, was originally sentenced to death in 1976 following a capital murder conviction in Harris County. His attorneys say he showed signs of serious mental illness since childhood and was deemed legally incompetent during his confinement. Jurors, however, were not asked to consider his mental illness during the punishment phase of the trial.

Earlier this year, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office joined Riles’ defense team in asking the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to consider a new punishment. The court agreed Tuesday, sending the case back to Houston for resentencing.

Riles’ attorneys, Thea Posel and Jim Marcus, celebrated the ruling and in a statement called his death sentence “an unconstitutional relic of a long-invalidated sentencing scheme.”

“Because he is too mentally ill to execute, Mr. Riles has spent decades — including several in solitary confinement — in a legal limbo between life and death,” they said. “Today’s decision will, hopefully, facilitate a resolution of the case.”

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg also was pleased with the ruling.

“We are glad Texas’s highest court unanimously agreed with prosecutors and defense lawyers that jurors must be able to consider a defendant’s mental health history before deciding punishment,” she said in a statement.

When asked about prosecutors’ position on a new punishment, a spokesman for the District Attorney’s Office said, “It’s our policy not to comment on what we’re going to do in court.”

At the time of Riles’ conviction, juries were not expected to consider mitigating evidence, such as a person’s childhood trauma or mental illness, during sentencing for capital crimes. A 1989 U.S. Supreme Court decision barred the execution of someone whose mental illness prevents them from understanding their punishment and the reason for it.

“Both prosecution and defense experts subsequently (and repeatedly) agreed that Mr. Riles is such a person,” Riles’ attorneys said.

The decision did not in

validate Riles’ sentence but rather prevented the state from carrying it out, his attorneys said.

Riles has lingered on death row for 45 years, shuffling back and forth between his unit and a psychiatric hospital. During that time, he was administered heavy antipsychotic drugs, his attorneys said.

Riles was initially charged in the 1974 murder of a Houston man.

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 the 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.

During Riles’ trial, his relatives testified about his “odd and often violent behavior” and their unsuccessful efforts to have his mental health professionally evaluated. Several psychiatrists and psychologists who evaluated his mental health after the slaying also testified, saying he had some form of schizophrenia.

Unhinged antics were documented in the initial trial, in which Riles tore off a doorjamb, 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. In 185 he set fire to himself — suffering burns to about 30 percent of his body — in his cell while reciting religious chants.

Early in his incarceration, Riles 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 in 1986 told reporters. “This is not living at all.”

He was nearly executed by lethal injection that year and got as far ordering his last meal. A stay prevented the execution hours before the scheduled punishment.