Rick Rhoades was convicted of killing 2 brothers 30 years ago, the day after he'd been released from prison on parole. His attorneys argued that racial bias in jury selection denied him a fair trial.
Texas carried out its 3rd execution of the year Tuesday night, lethally injecting Rick Rhoades for killing 2 men in their Houston-area home 30 years ago. In an unsuccessful last-ditch effort, his attorneys had hoped to delay the execution to explore whether racial bias during jury selection tainted his trial.
Rhoades, 57, was convicted of killing brothers Charles and Bradley Allen in September 1991, a day after his release on parole from a 5-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.
Less than an hour after the U.S. Supreme Court denied Rhoades' final appeal Tuesday afternoon, he was taken into Texas' death chamber in Huntsville. 2 of his friends were to stand witness, according to a prison report, along with two siblings of the slain brothers, the daughter of Bradley Allen and a friend to both of the murdered men.
Rhoades chose not make a final statement while laying on a prison gurney. He was pronounced dead at 6:29 p.m. after being injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital, the prison system reported.
After he was released from prison in 1991, 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 2 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 2 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, 1 Hispanic juror and 1 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’ last 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. The federal courts all rejected Rhoades' motions as well, ending with the nation's highest court Tuesday afternoon.
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 Monday “it was time.”
“It’s been 30 years,” he said. “When you kill 2 people less than 24 hours after you’re released from parole, that’s kind of a quintessential threat to society.”
Rhoades becomes the 3rd condemned inmate to be put to death this year in Texas and the 573rd overall since Texas resumed capital punishment on December 7, 1982. Rhoades becomes the 55th condemned inmate to be executed in Texas since Greg Abbott became Governor in 2015.
Rhoades becomes the 6th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1,535th overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977.
Source: Texas Tribune, Jolie McCullough, Rick Halperin, September 28, 2021
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
