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Thread: Rick Allan Rhoades - Texas Execution - September 28, 2021

  1. #61
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    speaking of that dexter dude, will he ever get what's coming?

  2. #62
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    I feel it’ll be a cold day in hell before he’s on the gurney. The fifth circuit still has not ruled on him.

  3. #63
    Moderator Bobsicles's Avatar
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    That’s because courts are all closed on weekends
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  4. #64
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    Bobsicles, I wasn’t referring to Rhoades, I meant Dexter Johnson who was stayed in August 2019.

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    Man convicted of killing brothers set to be Harris County's first execution in 2 years

    By Samantha Ketterer
    The Houston Chronicle

    A man is scheduled to be executed Tuesday for the 1991 double homicide of two brothers who were stabbed to death while sleeping at their Pasadena home.

    If no stay is granted for Rick Allan Rhoades, 57, his death penalty case will be Harris County’s first to reach the chamber in more than two years. Rhoades’ capital case has stretched on decades longer: A jury convicted him in 1992 for the murders of Charles and Bradley Allen, which occurred less than 24 hours after Rhoades was released on parole.

    An execution could mark the end of a nightmarish chapter for the Allen family, who has for 30 years seen Rhoades’ name resurface in letters about his attempts to be free from death row.

    “I will be happy for the day when there are no more appeals,” said Janice Andrews, the Allens’ sister. “We just want it over.”

    Rhoades’ trial garnered massive attention in the early ’90s, partly because of his criminal history and repeat releases on parole. He had previously served four prison sentences in Indiana and Texas, mostly for home and auto burglaries.

    The former laborer had served three years of a five-year sentence for burglary at the time of his latest parole date. Police found bloody footprints but no usable fingerprints at the scene and were still looking for a suspect until Rhoades’ arrest on a different charge the next month.

    After being caught for a burglary and VCR theft at a Pasadena elementary school, he told police he had information on a double homicide and was “tired of running,” according to Chronicle reports.

    “I’m just madder than hell,” Emma Allen, mother of the two slain men, said after Rhoades’ arrest. “It just seems to be the same old thing. Guys getting out of prison who should have been in jail for life.”

    Rhoades’ attorneys did not respond to requests for comment. His case was appealed last week to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals after a federal judge dismissed a complaint against state District Judge Ana Martinez, who said she didn’t have jurisdiction to decide on a motion that would have granted his attorneys access to juror information from the time of the trial.

    U.S. District Judge David Hittner also denied Rhoades a stay of execution.

    The crime

    After his release on parole in 1991, Rhoades took a bus to Houston instead of a halfway house, court documents show.

    Prosecutors and defense attorneys sparred on the details of what happened next, although Rhoades admitted to the Sept. 13 killings.

    State attorneys said Charles Allen, 31, and Bradley Allen, 33, went to bed after an eventful night and past several weeks: They had just hosted a party to watch a football game between the University of Houston and the University of Miami, and they were celebrating the opening of a recording studio as well as a recent move into their new home — on their childhood street.

    Prosecutors argued that Rhoades broke into the home to burglarize it and stabbed the brothers in the process, according to articles about the trial.

    His defense attorneys claimed Rhoades acted in self-defense. When he confessed, he told police he was drinking beer the night of the slayings and walked by the Allen brothers’ home because he planned to live in a vacant apartment he found nearby.

    Rhoades said he found himself involved in a “staring match” with one of the brothers, who told him to leave the area. He refused, and Charles Allen ran into his house, Rhoades told police.

    Fearing that the new homeowner was going to grab a firearm, Rhoades followed him inside, he said at the time. A fight ensued, and Charles Allen was stabbed to death. Bradley Allen was awakened by the fight and killed when he confronted Rhoades, according to the account shared with police.

    The men were discovered in the home the next day, stabbed multiple times with a butcher knife. Charles Allen was also beaten with a weight bar. Cash and a set of car keys were stolen during the burglary.

    Rhoades later told police he left the house to shower in an unoccupied apartment, first changing into clothes he took from the Allens.

    Appeals going nowhere

    Defense lawyers at the 1992 trial presented evidence that Rhoades had been severely abused by his parents before he was adopted at age 4. They also blamed his criminal behavior on the emotional trauma he suffered as a young child as well as a brain malfunction that affects his judgment and impulse control.

    Those issues have not been the subject of appeals. Rhoades, who claimed at the time to have a 140 IQ, argued that the convicting court unconstitutionally permitted the jury to hear testimony about the possibility of release on furlough for capital defendants sentenced to life in prison, according to court documents.

    Rhoades’ trial took place years after the high-profile Willie Horton case, in which a man serving a life sentence for murder left prison on a Massachusetts weekend furlough program and didn’t return. Before being captured, he committed assault, armed robbery and rape — which were mentioned in a controversial George H.W. Bush presidential campaign ad in 1988.

    The appeals didn’t change the course of the case. Most recently, defense attorneys Jeffrey Newberry and David Dow have fought for access to juror information, believing that two potential jurors might have been struck from the panel in a discriminatory manner.

    Martinez, the district judge now presiding over the court, did not take up the case because she struggled with jurisdiction.

    Rhoades is one of 74 people with Harris County cases on death row, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. His is one of the oldest, however.

    30 years later

    Several of the Allens’ family members are expected to be at the execution Tuesday, including a daughter of Bradley Allen who was not yet born at the time of the murders.

    She followed the profession of her father, who was a graphic artist, said Andrews, the sister. Charles Allen was an operator for a chemical company and an aspiring musician with a home full of recording equipment.

    Their loved ones were steadfast during the two-week trial, with about 30 of them attending each day. The Allens left behind three brothers and a sister, all of whom are now in their 60s. Their mother is also still alive.

    The tight-knit family chose to move on with their lives after the stabbings, but the deaths still took their toll.

    After 30 years, the edges of grief have softened a bit, Andrews said. Rhoades’ execution won’t make her feel better, though she hopes it will provide an end to ongoing case developments that remind her of her brothers’ brutal deaths.

    Andrews said she is personally liberal and uncertain on the death penalty as an issue but at least knows there isn’t a question that Rhoades killed her siblings.

    “I’ve seen so many wrongfully convicted people go to death row,” she said. “That’s not the situation here.”

    https://www.houstonchronicle.com/new...e-16489008.php

  6. #66
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    Stay of execution denied by the 5th Circuit.

    https://cases.justia.com/federal/app...?ts=1632763812
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  7. #67
    Moderator Bobsicles's Avatar
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    Only SCOTUS can save him now
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    Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. - Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt

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    Texas death row prisoner seeks stay on jury discrimination grounds

    By Danielle Haynes
    United Press International

    A Texas death row prisoner convicted of killing two brothers in 1991 sought a stay of execution from the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, one day before his scheduled execution.

    Rick Rhoades, 57, was sentenced to death in 1992 for the murders of Bradley Allen and Charles Allen. Rhoades stabbed the brothers to death as they slept after he entered their home and stole from them.

    The murders happened one day after Rhoades was paroled after serving a six-year prison sentence for burglary.

    Rhoades' attorneys previously sought a stay of execution from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, both of which denied him.

    He filed a new application for a stay Monday with the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking more time to gather information about jurors on his case. Defense lawyers believe people of color may have been intentionally excluded from serving on the jury.

    If Texas goes forward with Rhoades' execution Tuesday, he'll be the first person convicted in Harris County to be put to death in two years, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. He would be the third executed in Texas and sixth executed in the United States in 2021.

    https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2021...4471632787043/

  9. #69
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    Pasadena double murderer set to die Tuesday evening in third Texas execution this year

    Rick Rhoades was convicted of killing two brothers 30 years ago, the day after he'd been released from prison on parole. His attorneys have argued that racial bias in jury selection denied him a fair trial

    Texas is set to carry out its third execution of the year Tuesday night, lethally injecting Rick Rhoades for killing two men in their Houston-area home 30 years ago. In a last-ditch effort, his attorneys are hoping to delay the execution while they explore whether racial bias during jury selection tainted his trial.

    Rhoades, now 57, was convicted of killing brothers Charles and Bradley Allen in September 1991, a day after his release on parole from a five-year sentence for car theft and home burglary, according to prison records. When Rhoades was arrested weeks later for allegedly burglarizing a school, he confessed to the murders, court records state.

    After he was released from prison, Rhoades told police he took a bus to Houston and began drinking while wandering around his old neighborhood into the early morning, according to court records. Eventually, Rhoades and Charles Allen got into an argument outside the Allens’ house in Pasadena, and Rhoades followed Allen inside because he thought Allen was getting a gun.

    Rhoades beat Allen with a metal bar and stabbed him with a knife Allen had grabbed during the attack, the records said. Bradley Allen came out and began to hit Rhoades, who stabbed the brother. Prosecutors said Rhoades took clean clothing and cash when he left the house.

    Rhoades told police he found out the brothers died from the news later that day. When he was spotted during a school burglary weeks later, Rhoades said he was “tired of running” and was bothered by the murders, the records state.

    Shortly after he was sentenced to death in 1992, Rhoades, who is white, began arguing in appeals that Harris County prosecutors eliminated potential jurors from his trial because they were Black. A Texas court said his attorneys argued the county had a history of trying to exclude Black people from jury trials.

    When choosing jurors for trials, defense attorneys and prosecutors are able to remove a limited number of people from the potential juror pool without giving a reason, as long as the reason is not because of the person’s race. In the courtroom and in their appeals, Rhoades’ attorneys challenged two strikes as race-related, arguing that prosecutors probed the responses of two Black jurors more thoroughly than the white people on jury panels, as if looking for reasons to reject them.

    By 2019, state and federal courts of all levels had rejected Rhoades’ challenges, ultimately finding that prosecutors had reasonable grounds unrelated to race for striking the two Black people from the jury pool. Of their 14 strikes allowed without giving reason, the prosecutors had also struck 12 white people, an appeals court noted.

    Rhoades’ jury ultimately was made up of 10 white jurors, one Hispanic juror and one whose race was not clear from court records, the appeals court said.

    This year, Rhoades’ attorneys again sought missing information on the potential jurors. They argued that more information, like the racial breakdown of the entire jury pool, has not been disclosed, keeping Rhoades from presenting arguments that his trial was corrupted by racial bias.

    “He has been prevented from developing and raising his claim because the State has denied him access to the materials provided for by state law — materials which are necessary to conduct the comparative juror analysis,” his attorneys wrote in a district court filing in July.

    The Harris County district attorney’s office told Rhoades’ attorneys that there are more records on the jury pool available, but the trial court must order the release of the records. The trial court judge said she had no jurisdiction and wouldn’t rule on the matter, the courts said, prompting Rhoades’ latest appeals to state and federal courts.

    “It is clear — and indeed the district attorney has not disputed — that, under state law, the motion Counsel filed was precisely the correct vehicle by which to ask for access to the juror information,” his attorneys argued in a filing last week.

    In a 5-4 ruling, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in July declined to order the trial court judge to rule on the matter, though dissenting judges said the judge’s refusal was inconsistent with court precedent and suggested the court should have asked the judge why she didn’t think she had jurisdiction. A federal district court and appeals court also rejected Rhoades’ motions as of Monday.

    Rhoades’ attorneys said Monday they would file a last-resort appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

    The Texas Attorney General’s Office argued in a filing this month that the courts have no justification to stop an execution after Rhoades’ attorneys failed to seek this information for decades. Josh Reiss, who leads the Harris County District Attorney’s Post-Conviction Writs Division, said “it was time.”

    “It’s been 30 years,” he said. “When you kill two people less than 24 hours after you’re released from parole, that’s kind of a quintessential threat to society.”

    https://www.texastribune.org/2021/09...-rick-rhoades/
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  10. #70
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    Rhoades just rolled into town. Appeals pending at SCOTUS.
    "How do you get drunk on death row?" - Werner Herzog

    "When we get fruit, we get the juice and water. I ferment for a week! It tastes like chalk, it's nasty" - Blaine Keith Milam #999558 Texas Death Row

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