The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest court for criminal cases, ordered last month that a death sentence for a man convicted 27 years ago be commuted to life in prison based on his claim of intellectual disability.
Larry Estrada was convicted and sentenced to death in February 1998, when he was 19, for killing a clerk in a Harris County convenience store during a robbery. He was 18 at the time.
The CCA denied Estrada’s first appeal in 2002 and a second appeal in December 2019, claiming that his execution would violate the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments because of his intellectual disability under Atkins v. Virginia (2002). In June 2004, the trial court judge recommended relief. In April, the CCA found that he had met his burden to establish by a preponderance of the evidence that he has an intellectual disability and commuted his sentence to life in prison.
Mayer Brown, a law firm representing Estrada pro bono since 2003, hailed the CCA’s order as “a life-saving outcome for Mr. Estrada and a significant victory for the protection of intellectually disabled individuals in the criminal justice system.”
According to the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, 19 people have been removed from death row in Texas since 2017 due to evidence of intellectual disability. More than one-third of these cases came from Harris County.