Tomas Gallo, sentenced to death 20 years ago in Texas for killing his girlfriend's daughter, will not be executed, according to The Texas Tribune. Gallo will spend the rest of his life in prison after the state's highest criminal court commuted his capital sentence to life imprisonment, considering that he is not intellectually capable of understanding the punishment that awaited him.
Gallo was sentenced to death by a Harris County jury (which includes Houston) for killing Destiny Flores, his girlfriend's 3-year-old daughter, who was found with a fractured skull and signs of having been sexually assaulted after being under his care.
At the trial, Gallo's defense tried unsuccessfully to convince the jurors that Gallo suffered from an intellectual disability. Two years earlier the Supreme Court had prohibited the death penalty for people with this disability because the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.
After two decades awaiting his execution, and thanks to an unusual case of cooperation between Gallo's defense and the Prosecutor's Office, both parties presented a statement of what happened that concluded that the inmate suffers from an intellectual disability that should exclude him from death row. .
“They recognized that it was an injustice
,” Richard Ellis, Gallo's lawyer, told the aforementioned newspaper, who valued the cooperation in achieving this favorable decision for his client by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in a 5-4 vote. .
One of the key elements of the defense cited the testimony of George Denkowski, a psychologist who examined Gallo at the time and whose conclusion turned out to be false after determining that the convicted man's IQ must be higher than what he obtained in the tests to which he He submitted, in part, because he was Hispanic, according to court records cited by the newspaper.
Denkowski assured at the time that Gallo had an “antisocial lifestyle of low socioeconomic status,” so he could not be adequately evaluated by conventional tests.
Ellis called Denkowski's assessment "racist and unacceptable."
The Texas State Board of Psychological Examiners had already sanctioned Denkowski and even prohibited him in 2011 from evaluating people sentenced to death, determining that his methods were not based on scientific methods.
More than 12 men on death row in Texas, several already executed, were evaluated by Denkowski, and since 2011 when he was prohibited from examining any more, Texas courts have tried to resolve cases in which the specialist was involved, he explained. Ellis to the newspaper.
The court dismissed another claim made that Denkowski's false testimony violated Gallo's procedural rights.
Wednesday's decision is the second this year in which the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals removes a man from death row based on claims of intellectual disability, after removing Randall Mays, now sentenced to life in prison for the murder of two agents.