Execution Report: Leonard Rojas

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A jury convicted Rojas of capital murder in May 1996 and sentenced him to death. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and sentence in September 1998.

Rojas was originally scheduled for execution in 2000, after his appeals attorney failed to meet a filing deadline. According to the Texas Defender Service, the lawyer, David Chapman, had a mental disorder, had never worked on a capital appeals case before, and had his law license put on probated suspension three times. Chapman disputed the claims that he bungled Rojas' appeal, noting that Rojas gave three confessions to police. "I played a very bad hand as well as I could," Chapman said. "The facts of Mr. Rojas' case were extraordinarily incriminating."

At any rate, a federal judge allowed a new attorney to be appointed, and the usual appeals were then filed on Rojas' behalf. All of them were denied by the courts.

"I'll never regret it. Never," Rojas said of the killings in a death row interview. He said that his brother and wife taunted him all the time. When he confronted her about sleeping with David, she laughed and said, "You can't prove nothing, Leo." Rojas said that he used a .32-caliber gun he got in exchange for cocaine to shoot his wife and his brother. "I just snapped ... I just said, no more abuse from these people." Rojas also claimed that the two were trying to kill him slowly by poisoning his coffee. "These people, they were just basically evil," Rojas said. "They wanted my money, wanted my drugs, and they wanted to do me in." Though Rojas freely admitted his guilt, he also claimed that his court-appointed attorneys were incompetent and he did not get a fair trial.

Rojas declined to make a last statement at his execution. He was pronounced dead at 6:17 p.m.

By David Carson. Posted on 5 December 2002.
Sources: Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Texas Attorney General's office, Associated Press, Houston Chronicle, Huntsville Item.