San Benito Three
Cameron
County, Texas
Date of Crime: December 23, 1984
Jesse Romero Executed May 20, 1992
Davis Losada Executed June 4, 1997
Davis Losada, Jose “Joe” Cardenas, and Jesus “Jesse” Romero
were convicted of the rape and murder of 15-year-old Olga Lydia Perales. Losada and Romero were sentenced to death while Cardenas was given life
imprisonment. Perales had been found Dec. 24, 1984 in the brush on the
outskirts of San Benito, Texas. She had been bludgeoned 10 to 20 times
about the head and shoulders and stabbed twice in the chest after her death.
Two weeks later on Jan. 8, Rafael Levya, Jr., age 16, told his probation
officer he knew who killed Perales. Leyra initially stated he had only
seen the murder, but he would eventually admit involvement.
Leyra stated the defendants had gone to the home of Ray Amara in Cardenas'
car after hearing there was a party there. When the defendants got to
Amara's, there was no party but Amara told them he just had sex with Perales
in his shed. When Perales came out of the shed, the defendants offered
to give her a ride home. Perales agreed and got into the passenger
side of the car. Leyra was sitting in the back seat with along with
Losada. Cardanas was driving and Romero was sitting in the middle of
the front seat. The defendants drove Perales out to the country where
they gang raped and sodomized her. After the sexual assaults were
finished the defendants took turns beating Perales with a pipe to kill her
so that she would not report their crimes to the police.
The defendants were tried successively in separate trials with Leyra as the
star witness. Leyra's testimony about repeated rapes by individual
defendants appeared overwrought and seemed
calculated to incite prejudice against them. Leyra testified that
Romero held Perales with a knife even before the defendants' car left
Amara's house. This testimony perhaps was designed to cause the
defendants' juries to infer that she was abducted. It would have been easier for the
defendants to
have her sit in the middle front seat if they feared she would leave. At Romero's trial, Leyra
testified that Romero forced Perales into the car, again to indicate
abduction, yet he did not explain how Romero ended up sitting between her
and the driver. The prosecution presumably wanted to prove abduction
to secure the death penalty.
At Losada's trial, his attorney, Jose Luis Peña, barely questioned Leyva on
cross-examination. Peña had been assigned by the State to represent
Leyva, and had done so for a short time before he was re-assigned by the
State to represent Losada. Since Peña was bound by attorney-client
privilege to not reveal anything he had learned during his interview with
Leyva, the re-assignment created a clear conflict of interest and should not
have been permitted.
In appeals for Losada, Peña, who no longer represented Losada, conceded in
1989 and 1993 affidavits that he had been inhibited in his questioning of
Leyva because he had interviewed the same as his attorney. He could
not ask any questions for which he already knew the answers. Peña was
not specific about what questions he failed to ask, since that too would
violate attorney-client confidentiality. The appellate court was unimpressed
and argued the conflict was insignificant given the overwhelming evidence of
Losada’s guilt; it declined to grant a new trial.
Jesse Romero was executed for the crime on May 20, 1992. When Losada's
final 1997 execution date approached, Peña signed another affidavit
regarding his conflict of interest. In this affidavit, he violated his
attorney-client privilege with Leyva and told the appellate court what he
had learned in his one interview with Leyva. Peña's action was a
serious violation of legal ethics, although he could not lose his law
license as he had already been disbarred for pocketing money that belonged
to clients.
According to Peña, Leyva told him that Perales was engaging in consensual
sex with the others. Because he had been drinking and using drugs, he
had been unable to attain an erection. She mocked him, that enraged him, and
he killed her, to the shock and amazement of the others. Peña was an
officer of the court, whose testimony is normally accorded more weight than
that of ordinary trial witnesses like Leyra. Peña's affidavit was
corroborated by his undisputed representation of Leyra, by his failure to
seriously cross-examine the same, and by his earlier 1989 and 1993
affidavits.
Texas law technically prevented the defendants from being convicted by the
uncorroborated testimony of a co-defendant. Courts, however, ruled that Leyva's
testimony was corroborated by other witnesses, such as Amara, who placed the
defendants with Perales on the night of the crime. Nevertheless, the
corroboration of this one undisputed detail of Leyra's story does not
corroborate Leyra's claim that the defendants committed the crime. Texas courts rejected Peña's final affidavit and Losada was executed on June
4, 1997. His last words were, “If it matters to anyone, I did not kill
Olga.” Cardenas became eligible for parole in 2005, but as of 2011 he
is still serving a life sentence. [2/11]
________________________________
References: Skeptical
Juror, Losada v. Johnson,
Brownsville Herald
Posted in:
Victims of the State,
Southeast Texas Cases,
Defendants Executed by Texas
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