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Thread: Carlos David Caro - Federal Death Row

  1. #11
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    On July 6, 2018, the Fourth Circuit DENIED Caro's petition for en banc rehearing.

    https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketP...0Extension.pdf

  2. #12
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    In today's orders, the United States Supreme Court declined to review Caro's petition for certiorari.

    Lower Ct: United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
    Case Numbers: (16-1)
    Decision Date: May 8, 2018
    Rehearing Denied: July 6, 2018

    https://www.supremecourt.gov/search....c/18-6826.html

    Theoretically, Caro's appeals are now exhausted. Unfortunately, litigation over the federal government's lethal-injection protocol has continued to be bogged down in the District of Columbia District Court since 2006.

  3. #13
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    February 13, 2007

    Death penalty for strangling fellow inmate

    By Laurence Hammack
    The Roanoke Times

    Cell No. 123 of the federal penitentiary in Lee County was supposed to be the end of the line for Carlos Caro.

    Sentenced five years ago to 30 years for drug dealing, Caro quickly earned his way to the maximum security prison. First he joined a prison gang. Then he staged a yard fight. Then he stabbed a rival gang member 29 times. And then, not long after getting a new cellmate at the Lee County prison in 2003, he strangled the man with a wet bath towel.

    Rather than risk prolonging Caro's criminal career with a life sentence, a federal jury sentenced him Tuesday to death.

    It was the first death sentence obtained by federal prosecutors in the Western District of Virginia since Congress reinstated capital punishment in 1988, according to Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center.

    The key issue during a three-week trial in U.S. District Court in Abingdon was not whether Caro killed Robert Sandoval; he admitted that much right away. Caro, a member of the Texas Syndicate prison gang, said he strangled Sandoval to death after an argument over one man eating the other's breakfast the morning of Dec. 17, 2003.

    With guilt decided two weeks ago, the jury had to decide between a life sentence or what prosecutors said was the only way to stop Caro's violent ways: death by lethal injection.

    "That is the only way you can control Carlos David Caro," Assistant U.S. Attorney Tony Giorno told the jury. "All the other options have been tried. All the other options have been exhausted," he said, a reference to how prison officials kept transferring the inmate to more secure facilities, where he kept finding new victims.

    As Caro listened to the proceedings Tuesday, a bemused half-smile often tugged at his face. The 39-year-old Texas native wore a blue and white pinstriped shirt with an open collar that offered just a glimpse of the tattoos that cover most of his upper body.

    In recent years, federal prosecutors in Western Virginia have sought the death sentence in nearly a half-dozen other cases. But those trials, which ended in life sentences or dropped charges, for the most part featured weaker evidence and more sympathetic defendants.

    Yet defense attorneys still pleaded for mercy for a man whose daily prayer includes the words: "God, give the a--holes on this prison yard the good sense to stay the f--- away from me."

    If he were to receive a life sentence with no parole, "It is not a question of Mr. Caro leaving prison," defense attorney James Simmons said. "Mr. Caro will leave prison in a pine box."

    That may be true, retorted U.S. Attorney John Brownlee, who tried the case along with Giorno. "But the question you must ask yourself," he told the jurors, "is, 'How many others will join him?' "

    There were no witnesses to the killing of Sandoval, a 34-year-old serving time at U.S. Penitentiary-Lee for a conspiracy to smuggle illegal immigrants into the country. Still, Caro found himself in the difficult position of explaining how a dead man turned up inside his locked cell.

    But he never tried to hide his crime.

    About 7 p.m. on Dec. 17, 2003, Caro tapped on the window of his cell door to get the attention of a passing guard. "Get this piece of s--- out of here," he said, pointing to Sandoval's body on the floor of his cell.

    Caro would later tell FBI agents that he strangled Sandoval with a towel after they had argued earlier in the day, just hours after becoming cellmates. Caro had eaten Sandoval's breakfast that morning, he told federal investigators, which led Sandoval to curse him and threaten to eat his breakfast the next day.

    In a later telephone conversation with his wife that was intercepted by prison officials, Caro said he killed his cellmate because the man disrespected him, the jury was told.

    Both Caro and Sandoval were members of the Texas Syndicate.

    Formed in the 1970s at California's Folsom State Prison, the Texas Syndicate is one of five major gangs that claim turf behind prison walls, according to Robert Walker, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent who now serves as a gang identification consultant. The gang consists mostly of Hispanic inmates who banded together for protection from rival gangs, most notably the Aryan Brotherhood and the Mexican Mafia, Walker said.

    Although Sandoval's murder was apparently not gang-related, prosecutors nonetheless cited Caro's affiliation with the Texas Syndicate in seeking a death sentence. They cited how Caro communicated with gang members outside of prison with letters written in code and invisible ink in arguing that he would remain a threat to society if left to serve a life sentence.

    However, Simmons and co-counsel Steven Kalista tried to convince the jury that the federal government still had one option left in dealing with Caro. They argued that he would not pose a threat if locked up in a federal supermax prison in Colorado designed specifically to hold notorious criminals the likes of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.

    "Is Carlos Caro any more dangerous than those people?" Kalista asked the jury. "Think about that when you're deciding whether to take his life."

    Caro chose not to testify as the defense portrayed him as a child born into poverty and a dysfunctional household in the small Texas Panhandle town of Falfurrias. A high school dropout turned drug dealer, Caro did not become violent until he lost all hope for himself after receiving a 30-year prison sentence in 2001, the defense contended.

    Brownlee countered that Caro, who had served two shorter prison terms for peddling cocaine before incurring his 30-year sentence, had plenty of opportunities to change.

    "Every time his family held out hope that he would change, he disappointed them. Every time a judge punished him, he defied them. And every time the prison system tried to control him, he defeated them," the prosecutor told the jury.

    "We have done all we can do, so now we come to you."

    After deliberating a little more than two hours, the jury returned with its verdict of death.

    https://roanoke.com/archive/death-pe...8a54ca7d8.html
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

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