February 26, 2012
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The Tragedy of Cesar Fierro
Cesar Fierro had no apparent connection to the 1979 murder of taxi driver Nicholas Castanon. Castanon was shot and his body dumped from a taxi. Eyewitnesses identified two men later leaving the taxi. The two men were arrested and then released. Fierro was not one of them.
Five months later, Gerardo Olague, a 16-year-old, told police that Fierro was the killer. No physical evidence ever linked Fierro to the crime. Fierro was arrested.
Police told Fierro that they had his mother and stepfather in custody. Fierro said in an interview, “he told me if I signed, then they’d let them go, and if not, they were going to torture them.”
Fierro’s confession and Olague’s testimony were the only pieces of evidence presented at trial. Fierro was sentenced to the death penalty.
In 1996, the Judge Sharon Keller wrote the majority opinion for the trial court denying Fierro a new trial. She agreed that the confession had been coerced, but she said the error was “harmless”. She said Fierro had failed to prove harm by a “preponderance of evidence”.“The Court of Criminal Appeals simply raised the standard for ‘harmless error’ analysis to animpossible height,” says the website devoted to Cesar Fierro, and that is exactly what happened.
A confession is an incredibly strong piece of evidence. Without Fierro’s confession, the only evidence would have been Olague’s testimony. Police got the testimony by threatening to torture Fierro’s parents, and Judge Keller calls it “harmless”! A defendant has to meet such a high standard as to provide a “preponderance of evidence”! And the trial court makes it impossible. The trial court voted 5-4 that Fierro would have been found guilty even without his confession. Apparently, it believes Olague’s testimony alone is sufficient. How is that reasonable? Even the trial prosecutor says he would have dismissed the case, if he’d known how the confession was gotten.
The case would have rested on one person’s testimony, it would have been incredibly shaky, and the trial prosecutor would have dismissed it. But that’s all “harmless”.
5 out of 9 judges on the trial court denied him a new trial.
That’s not just.
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But this story has no happy ending, nor even a sad ending. It continues to be written every single day.
Cesar Fierro has spent 30 years on death row. He is still there today.
He has been scheduled for execution 14 separate times. All of this has taken a toll on his mental state. Hearing voices and wanting to injure himself, he requested psychiatric help, but was denied it.
A heartbreaking passage from the Texas Moratorium Network reads:
David Dow says he had heard rumors from other condemned clients that Fierro had “gone stark raving mad.” During Fierro’s decades on death row, his mother had died, his brother had died, his wife had divorced him and his daughter had stopped visiting him.Dow goes on to say that Fierro refused to shower. His cell walls were smeared with feces, and he had become very thin. He believed his attorneys were conspiring against him.
He has always maintained his innocence.
It’s not fair. Maybe it seems like police can be tough with criminals, because after all, they’re criminals right? But sometimes, they are innocent people, and innocent people suffer.
Cesar Fierro is still on death row! Each day that passes, he is still there in his cell, without family, driven mad waiting for execution.
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I beg you, please, help. Can we free him? Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
What we can do now though, is share his story. Make it as widely known as possible, in the hopes that one day, a tide of outrage might reach the Texas courts.
