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Thread: Victor Hugo Saldano (aka Victor Rodriguez) - Texas Death Row

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    Victor Hugo Saldano (aka Victor Rodriguez) - Texas Death Row






    Facts of the Crime:

    Argentinian citizen Victor Saldano was convicted of the November 1995 abduction and murder of Paul King. King was reportedly abducted from outside a convenience store and robbed of his cash and shot to death.

    Saldano was re-sentenced to death in Collin County in 2004.

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    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    On June 2, 2008, Saldano filed a habeas petition in Federal District Court.

    http://dockets.justia.com/docket/tex...v00193/110237/

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    Argentinian Mom Hopes Pope Can Help Get Son Out of Texas Death Row

    Lidia Guerrero says that when she met with Pope Francis in Rome last year, her told her he already knew all about her son, who has been on death row in Texas for 19 years.

    "I've prayed so much for that young man from Cordoba," she says Francis told her, referring to the Argentinian hometown of Victor Hugo Saldano. Pope Francis is also from Argentina.

    The meeting with the Pope in February 2014 left Guerrero with more hope than she has felt in years about the future of her son, who she says is guilty of murder but has been driven to insanity on death row.

    Pope Francis is a staunch critic of the death penalty. Like most countries in Latin America, Argentina does not have capital punishment.

    Death penalty opponents are hoping that Francis pressures lawmakers to abolish it when he visits the United States next month, and Guerrero is praying that the pope intervenes on behalf of her son.

    Such pleas by popes or politicians from other countries often fall on deaf ears, and face particularly long odds in Texas, the U.S. state that makes most use of the death penalty.

    Still, Pope John Paul II successfully won a reprieve in 1999 from Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan on behalf of a prisoner scheduled for execution who instead was ordered to serve life in prison without parole.

    "I have no certainty that Francis will ask for clemency for my son, but I do have hope," said Guerrero, 67.

    That hope is based on several factors, from the papal meeting to the legal fight surrounding Saldano's original death sentence. In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court sent the death sentence back to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to review because Saldano's Hispanic ethnicity was one of the criteria the jury considered when deciding between the death penalty and life in prison. In 2004, Saldano had a second sentencing trial that did not factor in ethnicity and was again given the death penalty.

    "Two different juries have found that Saldano is a future danger and should die for his crime," John R. Rolater, Jr., the assistant criminal district attorney in Collins County, where Saldano was convicted, wrote in an email response to questions from The Associated Press.

    Guerrero and her lawyer, Juan Carlos Vega, say they sent a letter to the Vatican about Saldano in December 2013, and were immediately invited to Rome. Since the meeting, Vega says he has provided Vatican officials documentation on the legal fight.

    "This isn't just one more death penalty case," said Vega, who helped present the case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

    Kenneth Hackett, U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, told the AP that he wasn't aware of Saldano's case but that people with loved ones in U.S. prisons frequently appeal to the pope. Hackett said Francis is very critical of the death penalty, and he may raise the issue while visiting a correctional center in Philadelphia.

    Guerrero says her son left home at 18, first going to Brazil, where his father was living, and then to several countries in South America. Saldano spent the next several years traveling and working odd jobs as he moved across Central America and Mexico.

    "From the time he was a boy, he always talked about seeing the world," said Guerrero.

    In the early 1990s, Saldano entered the United States illegally via the Mexico-Texas border. After spending some time in New York City, he returned to Dallas and worked in a factory.

    Guerrero says her son told her that he was living in a crime-ridden neighborhood and carried a gun for protection.

    On Nov. 25, 1995, Saldano and Mexican friend Jorge Chavez, drunk and high on crack cocaine, were seen holding Paul King at gunpoint in a parking lot.

    King was later found shot to death in a nearby forest. When Saldano was arrested, he was wearing King's watch and carrying the gun.

    During the penalty phase of the 1996 trial, psychologist Walter Quijano was called as an expert witness, according to court documents. Quijano presented 24 factors for the jury to use in evaluating whether Saldano would be dangerous in the future, including race.

    Quijano said that blacks and Hispanics were overrepresented in Texas prisons, and thus there was a correlation between race and future dangerousness.

    The jury gave Saldano the death penalty.

    After several appeals, in 2002 the Supreme Court sent the case back to Texas to review after then Texas Attorney General John Cornyn said the state erred by including ethnicity in the case.

    During the sentencing trial in 2004, Saldano masturbated twice in the presence of jurors, and prosecutors cited incidents inside the prison, like smearing feces and urine on cell walls.

    "They locked him in the pressure cooker of death row for seven years and then told everyone, `Look how dangerous he is,'" said Jonathan Miller, a professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles who has worked on Saldano's case.

    Rolater, the assistant district attorney, said that Saldano was competent to stand trial and "has a documented history of faking mental illness during his confinement."

    Saldano is in the Polunsky Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, about 75 miles (120 kilometers) northeast of Houston. Cells are 60 square feet (5.6 sq. meters) with small windows. Inmates are kept alone 23 hours a day.

    Saldano's execution date has not been scheduled.

    Even if Francis brings up the case, clemency is a long shot. It would require a recommendation from the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to Gov. Greg Abbott, and Abbott could reject it.

    Still, Guerrero would be happy with any development that shines a light on her son's case and capital punishment.

    "The death penalty is dangerous thing," said Guerrero. "And Victor has already paid for his crime."

    http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/a...-texas-n416821

  4. #4
    Moderator Ryan's Avatar
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    Argentine mom hopes Pope Francis can save her son in Texas

    Pope Francis on Saturday met a troubled fellow Argentine and mother of four: Lidia Guerrero, whose son, Victor Hugo Saldaņo, has spent 20 years on death row in Texas waiting to be executed, despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling finding racial prejudice in his sentence.

    ROME - Pope Francis always has a packed schedule, but on Saturday he made time to meet a troubled fellow Argentine and mother of four: Lidia Guerrero, whose son, Victor Hugo Saldaņo, has spent 20 years on death row in Texas waiting to be executed, despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling finding racial prejudice in his sentence.

    “I’m sure [Francis] will do all that is in his hands,” Guerrero told journalists in Rome after her private audience with the pontiff.

    “My son finds hope in my meetings with the pope,” she added.

    She refused to reveal many details of the meeting, only saying she felt welcomed by the pope, who “allowed me to share everything I wanted to.”

    This is the second time Guerrero has had the opportunity to talk with Francis, the first coming in 2014, at the end of one of the pope’s public audiences, a few months before she saw her son for the last time in November 2014.

    “My son’s situation is desperate,” she said on Saturday, at a press conference hosted at a hotel.

    “In three opportunities, he’s asked to be killed … what he leads is not a life, but psychological torture.”

    Saldaņo is confined in isolation, and according to his mother, the lack of contact with other humans has led him to want to die. Yet the two talks his mother has had with the pope, she said, “give him hope.”

    His only contact with the world outside are letters and the books his family send through two bookshops in Cordoba, Argentina, which had to be approved by the prison.

    During her talk with journalists, Guerrero was accompanied by her lawyer, Juan Carlos Vega, who helped present the case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

    “This isn’t just one more death penalty case,” Vega said.

    Saldaņo was born in Cordoba, Argentina, in 1972. On November 25, 1995 he and a Mexican friend, Jorge Chavez, kidnapped American Paul King at a parking lot of a supermarket in Plano, a wealthy suburb in Dallas.

    They drove him to a wooded area, stole $50 along with a plastic watch, and Saldaņo shot him five times.

    The Argentine confessed, and by July 1996 he had been sentenced to death.

    As her mother said on Saturday, he was on drugs at the time. Guerrero and her lawyer don’t argue that he’s innocent, but that he deserved to be sentenced to life in prison rather than to death.

    One basis for the death sentence was the report of a psychiatric expert, who claimed that Saldaņo was prone to backsliding if he lived because that’s what statistics allegedly show among Latino convicts.

    In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court sent the death sentence back to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for review because of ethnic discrimination. In 2005, he was once again sentenced to death.

    Yet according to Vera, the second ruling is even worse than the first, because it doesn’t take into consideration the fact that according to a precedent from a case called Soering vs the United Kingdom, Saldaņo was mentally incapacitated.

    Vera contends the ruling, from 1989, established that after four years on death row a person’s psyche is broken, meaning Saldaņo was incapable of defending himself the second time.

    “What we want is for him to leave death row and be placed in a federal psychiatric institution, because today he can’t be anywhere else,” he said.

    Guerrero said she’s praying Francis is able to do something on her son’s behalf, and for all those in the death row around the world - currently over 3,000 in the United States alone.

    If Francis does intervene, it wouldn’t be unprecedented: In 1999, Pope John Paul II won a reprieve from Missouri’s then-Governor Mel Carnahan on behalf of a prisoner scheduled for execution who instead was ordered to serve life in prison without parole.

    The Argentine pontiff has appealed for a global end to capital punishment several times, the last one being this February, when he told thousands gathered in Rome’s St. Peter’s Square that the sixth commandment “You shall not kill” applies to the innocent as well as the guilty.

    Last September, when he addressed a joint session of the US Congress, the pope said, “Every life is sacred, every human person is endowed with an inalienable dignity, and society can only benefit from the rehabilitation of those convicted of crimes.”

    He also offered encouragement to those convinced that just punishment must never exclude hope and the goal of rehabilitation.

    https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-us...ave-son-texas/

  5. #5
    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
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    On July 18, 2016, Saldano's habeas petition was DENIED in Federal District Court.

    https://docs.justia.com/cases/federa...0193/110237/92

    On September 21, 2016, Saldano filed an appeal before the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

    https://dockets.justia.com/docket/ci...s/ca5/16-70025
    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

    "They will hurt you. They will hurt your grandma, these people. The root cause of this is there's no discipline in the homes, they don't go to school, you know, they live off the government, no personal accountability, and they just beat people up for no reason, and it's disgusting." - Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters

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    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
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    COA granted in part and denied in part today by the 5th Circuit.

    http://cases.justia.com/federal/appe...?ts=1498671047
    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

    "They will hurt you. They will hurt your grandma, these people. The root cause of this is there's no discipline in the homes, they don't go to school, you know, they live off the government, no personal accountability, and they just beat people up for no reason, and it's disgusting." - Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters

  7. #7
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    Court agrees to review death-row case of Plano murderer whose sentence caught Pope Francis' eye

    By Nicole Cobler
    The Dallas Morning News

    A federal appeals court has agreed to review the case of an Argentine man who is on death row for the 1995 killing of a man abducted from a Collin County supermarket.

    The decision comes more than two decades after Victor Hugo Saldano, now 45, was convicted of capital murder and sentenced in 1996 to die for kidnapping Paul Ray King from a Sack 'n Save in Plano.

    Saldano and a friend forced King into their car at gunpoint, drove to Lavon Lake and shot him five times.

    Saldano, a day laborer from Argentina, was 24 years old and in the U.S. illegally when he killed King. His accomplice, Jorge Chavez, is serving a life sentence.

    The case drew attention from his homeland and Pope Francis, who started corresponding with Saldano's mother, Lidia Guerrero, in 2013and has met with her at least twice. The Catholic Church does not support capital punishment.

    Argentine journalists covering the six-day trial told The Dallas Morning News in 1996 that Saldano was the first person sentenced to death from Argentina since it won independence from Spain in 1809.

    A judge later threw out the sentence because Walter Quijano, a clinical psychologist, improperly testified at trial that Saldano's Hispanic background made him likely to be a future danger. Saldano was again sentenced in 2004 to die.

    The appeals court wrote that there was "ample evidence" to support Saldano's incompetency in its decision to consider the case. The court pointed to examples of Saldano refusing to wear nonprison clothes, masturbating in the courtroom, laughing during testimony and rocking in his chair.

    "Saldano's broken and sometimes incoherent speech suggests that he may not have been able to communicate effectively," the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote.

    The court also granted the decision on the grounds of ineffective counsel. Both the trial judge and Saldano's lawyers had concerns about his mental state, but defense attorneys never requested a competency hearing, the 5th Circuit wrote.

    Lower courts have ruled that the trial court had no obligation to hold a competency hearing.

    https://www.dallasnews.com/news/cour...pe-francis-eye

  8. #8
    Senior Member CnCP Legend FFM's Avatar
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    Federal habeas relief denied today by the 5th Circuit.

    http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions...16-70025.0.pdf

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    Moderator Bobsicles's Avatar
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    September 5, 2019

    Why Pope Francis and the Texas Bishops are trying to save a man on death row

    The Catholic bishops in Texas are aiding efforts to stop the execution of a man whose case has captured Pope Francis’s attention amid a shift in the church to reject the death penalty in all circumstances.

    As the Supreme Court prepares to decide in October whether to hear the case of Argentina native Victor Hugo Saldaņo, the Texas Catholic Bishops Conference is lobbying the justices to lessen his sentence. Saldaņo’s death sentence was first thrown out by the Supreme Court over a determination of racial bias, and the bishops argue that he was resentenced to death because solitary confinement had driven him to mental decline.

    “The remedy for the violation of his rights cannot be another death sentence, but commutation of the sentence to life imprisonment,” attorneys for the bishops wrote last month in a petition to the Supreme Court.

    Saldaņo’s case has been of particular interest to Pope Francis, who also hails from Argentina. Saldaņo’s mother, Lidia Guerrero, has said the pontiff told her in 2014 that he was praying for her son, who was convicted in a 1995 killing. Guerrero also has met with Pope Francis twice.

    The Texas bishops’ intervention comes a year after Pope Francis revised Catholic teaching to hold that capital punishment is always inadmissible and an affront to the “dignity of the person.” The church had said the death penalty could be acceptable in rare cases.

    This evolution in church teaching has been met with some resistance, including from five cardinals and bishops who in May signed a “declaration of truths” that they said reaffirmed the church’s position on issues including capital punishment. The Church, the document says, “did not err in teaching that the civil power may lawfully exercise capital punishment on malefactors where this is truly necessary to preserve the existence or just order of societies.”

    The Texas bishops wrote in their petition that they were pleading Saldaņo’s case not only because it involved the church’s position on the sanctity of human life, but also because the church holds that racial bias like that employed against Saldaņo is evil.

    Saldaņo was convicted in 1996 of capital murder for kidnapping a man at a supermarket in Plano, Tex., driving him to a local lake and fatally shooting him. At Saldaņo’s trial, a state psychologist, Walter Quijano, testified that Saldaņo’s Hispanic heritage put him at a higher risk for perpetrating future violence.

    Saldaņo’s case rose to the Supreme Court in 2000 and elicited an admission from Texas’s attorney general that the race-based testimony had made Saldaņo’s sentencing hearing unconstitutionally flawed, the bishops’ petition says. The court sent the case back to Texas, the petition says, but Saldaņo had become mentally unstable by the time he got a new trial in 2004.

    Saldaņo was kept for four years before the retrial at Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Tex., where the petition says inmates stay alone in six-by-nine foot cells guarded by steel doors for 23 hours each day. Food is slipped through the bottom of the doors, the petition says, and visitors are not allowed. Saldaņo attempted suicide in 2001, spent several periods of time in a psychiatric hospital and collected disciplinary infractions because of his mental decline, the petition says.

    To sentence a defendant to death in Texas, a jury has to find they have a high likelihood of “future dangerousness,” said Jonathan Miller, an attorney for Argentina’s government, which is also advocating for Saldaņo’s sentence to be commuted. At his retrial, Saldaņo masturbated in front of jurors, looked at people strangely and spoke incoherently, Miller said, influencing the jury’s decision that he posed a continued threat to the public.

    “He was so degraded mentally that it made any kind of analysis of future dangerousness impossible,” Miller, who is also a professor at Southwestern Law School, told The Washington Post. “How do you evaluate someone for future dangerousness if they’ve been in severe isolation for many years and they’re no longer the same person anymore?”

    Texas has executed far more prisoners since 1977 than any other state, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Most recently, Larry Swearingen was executed Aug. 21 for killing a college student in 1998. He maintained until his death that he had not committed the murder.

    https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...7MXHuRCtyKQ3yZ

  10. #10
    Moderator Bobsicles's Avatar
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    This article was made before Crutsinger and Soliz were juiced

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