Page 1 of 2 12 LastLast
Results 1 to 10 of 17

Thread: Joseph Francois Jean - Texas

Hybrid View

Previous Post Previous Post   Next Post Next Post
  1. #1
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217

    Joseph Francois Jean - Texas


    Chelsey Lang, and her 16-year-old cousin, Ashley Johnson






    Harris Co. juries hearing 2 death-penalty cases today

    By Brian Rogers
    The Houston Chronicle

    Prosecutors beginning Tuesday will seek the death penalty for two men — one accused of bludgeoning two Baytown teens before leaving their bodies in a burning house, the other accused of two north Houston robberies that turned into fatal shootings.

    Jurors have been selected to hear weeks of testimony in two Harris County courtrooms before deciding the fates of Joseph Francois Jean and Teddrick Batiste.

    In opening arguments Tuesday, prosecutors are expected to tell jurors that Jean, 38, told police that he had used a baseball bat to kill two teenage girls after sneaking into his ex-girlfriend's home in April 2010.

    Jean said he went through an unsecured window of Victoria Wiley's townhouse, according to court documents. Jean said he was dousing the hallway with gasoline when one of the teens came out of a bathroom, startling him. He knocked that girl down and got a baseball bat.

    He told police he "blacked out" and did not remember anything after that, investigators said.

    Wiley's 17-year-old daughter, Chelsey Lang, and her 16-year-old cousin, Ashley Johnson, were found in the home after firefighters extinguished the blaze.

    The girls were home alone for a sleepover. Wiley and her 15-year-old son, Naquiel, stayed with friends and family.

    Jerald Graber, one of Jean's attorneys, said Jean maintains his innocence and will plead not guilty.

    "He says he didn't do it," Graber said. He said Jean is anxious about the two-week trial.

    "For anyone facing a trial, it's nerve-wracking, but especially for someone who's looking at the death penalty if the jury convicts him," Graber said.

    Investigators said Jean stalked and harassed Wiley for years after she ended their two-year relationship in 2006.

    That harassment included Jean taking clothes, jewelry and purses from Wiley's house and burning them, just after the relationship ended.

    Days later, Jean beat Wiley for calling the police, according to police reports.

    He later pleaded guilty to attempted burglary and retaliation in exchange for a three-year prison sentence. He was behind bars about a month before being released on mandatory supervision.

    Wiley told police he soon began harassing her with text messages and phone calls.

    Jean later pleaded guilty to "harassing communications" and was sentenced to 10 days in jail. His parole also was revoked. He was sent back to prison.

    Nine months before the double homicide, he was again let out early.

    Jean has been charged with more than 25 crimes, including drug possession and assault, beginning in 1990. His capital murder trial is expected to last about two weeks.

    On June 6, Teddrick Batiste is expected face a three-week death penalty trial, accused of shooting Horace Holiday and stealing his Cadillac for the chrome rims.

    Batiste, 23, is accused of killing Holiday at a gas station near Aldine Mail Route and Eastex Freeway about 3 a.m. April 19, 2009.

    Driving the victim's car, Batiste led police on a chase north on Eastex Freeway before the vehicle was stopped with spike strips, authorities said.

    Batiste also was implicated in the robbery and shooting death of a tattoo parlor owner a month earlier.

    Batiste and Leon Thompson III, 21, were charged with capital murder, accused in the April 8, 2009, fatal shooting of parlor owner Steve Robbins at the Black Widow in the 2000 block of Mangum.

    Charges against Thompson are pending. He remains in the Harris County Jail without bail.

    If Batiste is convicted of Holiday's murder, jurors could hear evidence about the tattoo parlor shooting in the punishment phase, said Assistant Harris County District Attorney Traci Bennett.

    Batiste's attorneys did not return calls for comment.

    Five people have been sentenced to death since Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos took office in January 2008.

    http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/...#ixzz1NvYlOuh5

  2. #2
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217
    Guilty verdict in Baytown double murder case

    A Harris County jury has returned a guilty verdict in the trial of a man accused in the murders of two Baytown teenagers.

    Joseph Jean was charged with capital murder in the deaths of his ex-girlfriend's daughter, Chelsey Lang, 17, and her cousin, Ashley Johnson, 16.

    The jury deliberated Monday for about four hours before arriving at the guilty verdict. The trial moved into the punishment phase. Jean faces the death penalty.

    Baytown police say in April of last year, the teens caught Jean pouring gasoline inside the home of Lang's mother. Then Jean beat the girls to death with a baseball bat and set the home on fire.

    Prosecutors say Jean had threatened to kill his ex-girlfriend. Jean said he did not commit the crime.

    http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?se...cal&id=8186957

  3. #3
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217
    In today's orders, the United States Supreme Court declined to review Jean's petition for certiorari.

    Lower Ct: Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas
    Case Nos.: (AP-76,601)
    Decision Date: June 26, 2013
    Rehearing Denied: August 21, 2013
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  4. #4
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Location
    Germany
    Posts
    13,014
    Texas attorneys brace for new round of death penalty appeals after intellectual disability ruling

    By Brian Rogers
    The Houston Chronicle

    Tomas Gallo smiled and laughed as Harris County jurors decided his fate for the rape and murder of his girlfriend's 3-year-old daughter.Gallo had covered the girl's body with bruises and bite marks before sexually assaulting and bludgeoning her while her mother was at work just a few days before Christmas in 2001. He then cleaned up the blood-spattered bathroom, dressed the child in clean clothes and called her mother to say the girl was not breathing.

    Jurors agreed he should be sentenced to death, despite his lawyers' arguments that he was intellectually disabled.

    Now, however, Gallo and at least nine other death row inmates from across Texas - including five others from Harris County - are seeking to have their death sentences thrown out in exchange for life in prison under a ruling earlier this year by the U.S. Supreme Court that changed how Texas determines intellectual disability.

    Some, including Gallo, could eventually walk free, since life without parole was not an option in Texas when they were convicted.

    "When we think about it, it just tears us up again," said Rosa Flores, the child's paternal grandmother. "I don't feel that this young man has any kind of problem. He might have a low IQ but that doesn't mean he's stupid or dumb. He knows what he's doing."

    Their fears are echoed among other families awaiting execution of a capital murderer, said Andy Kahan, victim's advocate for the city of Houston.

    "There's a lull where you're waiting on justice, for maybe a decade, and you're riding that roller coaster and all of a sudden that coaster gets taken down because you're right back in court again," Kahan said. "And you have to re-live all the nightmares of what happened to your family."

    The U.S. Supreme Court abolished the death penalty in 2002 for people with intellectual disabilities, but left it up to states to set standards for determining disability. A follow-up ruling by the Supreme Court in March in a different Harris County case overturned Texas' method for determining intellectual disability, saying it was out of date and ineffective.

    The March ruling left Texas prosecutors and defense attorneys scrambling to review cases, some dating back decades. Harris County has 82 inmates on death row, though it remains unclear how many cases in Houston or across Texas will be affected by the ruling.

    Attorneys on both sides are bracing for what could be a wave of appeals, with some putting the number in the dozens.

    "They could be looking at a nightmare," said Tom Moran, a Houston criminal defense and appellate attorney who is representing another inmate, Joel Escobedo, in his attempt to get his death penalty overturned.

    District Attorney Kim Ogg said her office is keeping a close eye on the legal developments and she is sympathetic to the families of the victims.

    "Taking a person's life is the most serious action a government can take against an individual," Ogg said, "and we are making every effort to ensure that offender's Constitutional rights are respected."

    Moore and the law

    The March ruling came in the case of Bobby Moore, convicted of capital murder in the death of a Houston store clerk in April 1980.

    Moore, now 57, shot and killed 73-year-old James McCarble at Birdsall Super Market near Memorial Park, a store he and two accomplices picked because two elderly people were running the customer-service booth and the cashier was pregnant. After shooting McCarble with a shotgun, Moore fled and was arrested 10 days later in Louisiana.

    He was sentenced to die by lethal injection.

    His attorneys appealed the conviction, arguing that the judge and jury should have considered his intellectual disability as outlined in a landmark 2002 ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court that prohibited execution of the intellectually disabled.

    The ruling stemmed from the conviction of Daryl Atkins, a mentally disabled Virginia man who was sentenced to death for the kidnapping, robbery and murder of an air force serviceman in 1996.

    The Atkins decision set off waves of appeals by inmates, many of whom had their death sentences changed to life in prison. At least 15 Texas inmates were removed from death row for being mentally disabled in the wake of the decision, according to the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

    To qualify for the Atkins exemption, inmates must have a low IQ, typically under 70, and significant problems adapting to their surroundings that were evident even in childhood. Figuring out how to determine that fell to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which adopted a seven-pronged test to determine intellectual disability in the state.

    The test, named after plaintiff Jose Briseno, referenced Lennie, the fictional character from John Steinbeck's novel "Of Mice and Men," as someone most Texans would agree should be exempt from the death penalty.

    The "Briseno factors," as they came to be known, consisted of seven questions to help courts decide whether someone shows "adaptive behavior" that suggests they are not intellectually disabled. The questions ranged from whether someone can lie effectively to whether his conduct shows leadership.

    In Moore's case, however, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote in a 5-3 majority opinion that the Texas courts relied too heavily on IQ scores and non-clinical evaluations by judges. She said the state should have used evaluations by mental health professionals to determine intellectual disability.

    Moore's precedent-setting case was sent back to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which has yet to issue a ruling on how the state's courts will determine intellectual disability.

    In the meantime, other death row inmates are asking for reconsideration of their sentences.

    Joshua Reiss, head of the post-conviction writs division at the Harris County District Attorney's office, has been notified that at least three inmates, including Gallo, are appealing under the March ruling. He said he expects 6 to 10 death row inmates from Harris County to appeal over the next few years. Even though they are being appealed under the same decision, he said each one would be different.

    "They're very fact-intensive, they're going to be expert-intensive," he said. "We're going to take each one individually."

    Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court sent the San Antonio case of convicted killer Obie Weathers back to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to be reevaluated under the new law.

    Local cases affected

    The first Houston case reconsidered under the Moore ruling was Robert James Campbell.

    Mental health professionals on both sides agreed that he was mentally disabled. In a plea deal designed to make sure he never leaves prison despite being eligible for parole, he ended up with a life sentence earlier this year.

    The new sentence was accepted bitterly by the family of his victim, Alexandra Rendon, a 20-year-old bank teller who was abducted from a gas station, raped and killed.

    "To me, it's an extremely borderline case of whether Robert James Campbell is mentally well for execution," Israel Santana, Rendon's cousin, said at the time. "Me and my family, we strongly believe that he is. But in no way do we want to be a part of executing someone who is questionable."

    Santana, an attorney, said he and his family have a duty to follow the law.

    "As much as it hurts, we accept the State of Texas and the Supreme Court's ruling taking Robert James Campbell off death row," he said with tears in his eyes. "There are laws left and right that we may not agree with, but we have to abide by."

    Gallo and two other condemned men, Harlem Lewis and Joseph Jean, have notified the Harris County District Attorney's Office they will also seek to have their death penalty sentences overturned.

    Lawyers for Gallo argued during trial that someone else in the family killed the young girl. After he was convicted of capital murder, they argued that he was too mentally disabled to execute.

    "It's not an act," said A. Richard Ellis, Gallo's appellate attorney. "Someone can't just rig up an (intellectual disability) claim after the fact and make it fit the law. He had abysmal school performance, was in special education and on and on. This is an ongoing disability."

    The prosecutors who put Gallo on death row, who no longer work at the Harris County DA's office, did not return calls and emails. At trial, prosecutors and the jury relied on the Briseno test to determine that Gallo was not disabled.

    In a more recent case, Lewis, now 26, landed on death row for gunning down Bellaire Police Officer Jimmie Norman and good Samaritan Terry Taylor after a police chase in 2012.

    Lewis testified in his own defense that he was scared after a police chase and shot both men after a struggle to get him out of his car. His attorneys did not raise his intellectual capacity at trial but the issue is allowed in his appeal.

    "A lot of us have the idea that if someone's not drooling in the corner, they can't have intellectual disability," said Gretchen Sween, an appellate attorney for Lewis. "Harlem Lewis's case shows that somebody can successfully mask all kinds of things, and it takes an expert to go in and investigate and understand what adaptive deficits mean."

    In another case that is being appealed, Joseph Francois Jean, 45, landed on death row in 2011. He broke in to the home of an ex-girlfriend he was stalking and, finding just her teenage daughter and niece having a sleepover, beat the teens to death with a baseball bat on April 11, 2010. He then set the townhouse on fire using gasoline and fled. He was convicted of killing Chelsey Lang, 17, and her cousin, 16-year-old Ashley Johnson.

    Those cases could be just the beginning. Attorneys who work on death penalty appeals agree there could be 8 to 12 more Harris County cases in which the new rule applies.

    "If there's one case that would be affected by this, I'd be thrilled," said defense attorney Pat McCann. "And I'm pretty sure there's a dozen."

    Other cases

    Other cases are also working their way through the state and federal courts.

    Attorney Moran has filed an appeal in federal court for Escobedo, who was convicted in 1999 of robbing and killing a 65-year-old man for drug money at an East End bus stop. Guadalupe Garcia was pistol-whipped, robbed, then shot.

    In his pleadings, Moran cited two other death row inmates whose cases involved claims of intellectual disability: Raymond Martinez and James Henderson.

    Martinez's case was closed in August when the 71-year-old died of natural causes after three decades on death row. A diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic with an IQ of 65, he was convicted of a 1983 crime spree that left five people dead. He died with claims still pending that he was mentally disabled.

    Henderson, 44, was convicted in 1994 of shooting 85-year-old Martha Lennox while burglarizing her Clarksville home in East Texas. He was convicted in Bowie County.

    Sween, an attorney for the state's Office of Capital and Forensic Writs, said the agency is handling at least five cases stemming from the Moore ruling.

    "We shouldn't let unscientific biases come into play in this really important question," she said. "We should listen to what the scientists tell us about how you diagnose somebody."

    Looking ahead

    Death penalty opponents have cheered the Moore decision, saying courts have a tendency to look at a defendant's strengths and rule that they are not mentally disabled, rather than look at the disability.

    "Based on Justice Ginsberg's opinion, you have to use the best medical standards available and focus on the disabilities to determine whether someone meets the standard," said McCann, Moore's attorney. "That's a game-changer because the courts have tended to put their thumb on the scale towards any showing of strength or some competency in some field as negating retardation, and that's just not how one determines that."

    But critics argue that reducing old capital murder convictions obtained before the state's "life without parole" law was passed in 2005 means killers who have been behind bars for decades are eligible almost immediately for parole.

    In most death penalty cases that have been changed to life sentences, defense attorneys work with prosecutors to craft elaborate sentencing arrangements to ensure that the former death row inmate never walks free. The common goal, both sides agree, is making sure killers never get out of prison, even if they get off death row.

    But it's still possible.

    In Campbell's case, District Attorney Ogg has promised to protest any possible parole. Similar arrangements are likely to materialize as other cases are considered in light of the new ruling.

    In Gallo's case, the victim's family remains unconvinced that he is so mentally disabled that he should not be executed.

    He has apparently been able to make jailhouse wine and give himself a jailhouse tattoo with a makeshift tattoo gun, said Flores, the child's grandmother.

    "I don't think his IQ is all that low because he's got common sense," she said. "If you've got common sense, you've got a lot going for you."

    http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news...h-12271127.php

  5. #5
    Senior Member CnCP Addict
    Join Date
    Feb 2021
    Posts
    702
    Habeas corpus relief GRANTED and death sentence commuted to LWOP by the TCCA.

    https://search.txcourts.gov/SearchMe...c-e014a7112cb2

    Judge Kevin Yeary filed a dissenting opinion.

    https://search.txcourts.gov/SearchMe...e-edbbc979b4e2
    Last edited by Julius; 04-19-2023 at 09:12 AM.

  6. #6
    Moderator Bobsicles's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2019
    Location
    Tennessee
    Posts
    7,316
    The TCCA was doing so good this year and they just had to screw it up. Props to Judge Yeary for seeing through the BS.

    I work with actual intellectually disabled people twice a week and can tell you that these claims are BS.
    Thank you for the adventure - Axol

    Tried so hard and got so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter - Linkin Park

    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

    I’m going to the ghost McDonalds - Garcello

  7. #7
    Joseph Jean sentenced to death by a Harris County jury

    http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?se...rticle-8197069

    I never have my doubts about a death sentence being imposed by a Texas jury, they always do the right thing! Don't mess with Texas!

  8. #8
    Administrator Michael's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Location
    Germany
    Posts
    1,515
    I wish Germany had a justice system like Texas' too. It´s not perfect, but from an outside view I have a good impression of the system.

  9. #9
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217
    New state office handling convicted Baytown murderer’s death-sentence habeas appeal

    The capital murder conviction of a Baytown man is a new case for a relatively new state office charged with habeas corpus appellate representation of death-sentenced convicts.

    The Texas Office of Capital Writs, which will mark its first anniversary Sept. 1, advocates on behalf of indigent individuals sentenced to death in Texas, and Joseph Francois Jean is one of them.

    A jury convicted Jean on June 17 in the Harris County 230th District Court. Criminal District Judge Belinda Hill gave him the death penalty on the same day, eight days prior to Jean’s 39th birthday.

    Jean was convicted for the April 11, 2010, murders of Ashley Johnson and Chelsy Lang, each 17 years old, by using, according to the indictment, “a deadly weapon, namely a blunt object.”

    While extinguishing a residential fire, Baytown firefighters found the victims’ bodies.

    The court appoints the OCW, in accordance with the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure. In Jean’s case, Hill appointed the OCW after the court determined that the convict was indigent.

    OCW director Brad D. Levenson said that his office provides solely habeas representation; it does not handle direct appeals. There is a difference. Jean and anyone else in his situation would have another attorney for the direct appeal.

    Jean had a statutory right to both forms of appeal.

    “Every person that is convicted of a capital murder gets an appeal, which is based on the record, and a habeas, which is an outside-the-record litigation,” Levenson said. “A direct appeal is based on the record at trial. So anything that happens at trial that is in the transcript would be subject to a direct appeal. You’re just appealing anything that happens specifically at trial.

    “A habeas will look at things necessarily that might not have happened at trial.”

    Speaking generally and not specifically about Jean’s case or about any other case, Levenson said that a habeas appeal might examine whether an investigation was incomplete or whether evidence should have been turned over, among numerous possibilities. He re-emphasized that those matters apply to habeas appeals in general and not to Jean’s matter, an ongoing investigation on which the OCW does not comment.

    The office is in the early phase of its investigation of Jean’s case, which consists of document collection.

    “This is really a new case—really new,” Levenson said. “So, at this point, we’re just collecting documents to review. It takes really months to get records. You collect trial counsel’s file. You collect investigator files. Anyone from the defense team, you collect their files. Any experts who might have testified, you collect any files that they may have. Then you also wait for the transcript to be prepared because you need to read the transcript. And that takes three to six months to get.”

    There were no impediments to the OCW representing Jean.

    “Now, under the statute, the judge must appoint the Office of Capital Writs for a post-conviction proceeding,” Levenson explained. “We can decline the representation if we have a conflict with the case or workload issues. We don’t have a workload issue at this point, and we didn’t have a conflict, so we accepted it.”

    The OCW follows a different appellate path.

    “When we file an application, it will go back to the convicting court, so it will go back to the trial court,” Levenson said. “Then, once the trial court is finished with it, it will go to the Court of Criminal Appeals. The direct appeal goes directly to the Court of Criminal Appeals.”

    Levenson came to the OCW attuned to the office’s area of representation. He served as a deputy federal public defender in the Capital Habeas Unit of the federal public defender’s Los Angeles office. He was a California deputy attorney general in the Appeals, Writs, and Trials Unit beforehand.

    Levenson has confidence in his staff.

    “I feel great about it; we’ve put together a really wonderful staff,” Levenson said. “It’s small, and we have a lot of work. But it is a very dedicated staff, a very smart staff, and I am very pleased with it.”

    http://www.yourhoustonnews.com/lake_...80285942f.html

  10. #10
    Jan
    Guest


    Name: Jean, Joseph Francois
    TDCJ Number: 999566
    Date of Birth: 06/25/1972
    Date Received 06/23/2011
    Age (when Received): 38
    Education Level (Highest Grade Completed): 08
    Date of Offense: 04/11/2011
    Age (at the time of Offense): 38
    County: Harris
    Race: Black
    Gender: Male
    Hair Color: Black
    Height: 6'03"
    Weight: 178
    Eye Color: Brown
    Native County: Christead
    Native State: Virgin Islands

    http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/death_ro...eanjoseph.html

Page 1 of 2 12 LastLast

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •