Execution Report: David Powell

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In order to impose a death sentence, juries must find not only that the defendant is responsible for capital murder, but also that he poses a future danger to society. At Powell's punishment hearing, Drs. Coon and Parker testified as to his future dangerousness, based on the examination they conducted when evaluating his sanity and competence.

A jury convicted Powell of capital murder in September 1978 and sentenced him to death. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and sentence in July 1987.

Sheila Margaret Meinert was convicted of attempted capital murder for her part in the incident at the apartment parking lot. She was sentenced to 15 years in prison. She was paroled in June 1989. With no arrests after her parole, she was discharged from her sentence in January 2000.

In 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Satterwhite v. Texas that the Fifth and Sixth Amendments guarantee criminal defendants the right to be told in advance that a psychiatric evaluation may be used to determine their future dangerousness, that they have the right to remain silent, and that their counsel must be informed that the evaluation is taking place. Because of the similarities between Satterwhite's case and Powell's, the Supreme Court sent Powell's case back in June 1988 to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for reconsideration in light of this recent decision.

On review, the Texas court held that Powell waived his right to object to the testimony of Dr. Coons and Parker when his lawyers used psychiatric testimony to argue for an insanity defense. Such an argument, the court reasoned, entitles the state to present psychiatric evidence in refutation. The Court of Criminal Appeals reaffirmed Powell's guilty verdict and death sentence in January 1989.

The case then went back to the Supreme Court, which found that while the Court of Criminal Appeals dealt with the Fifth Amendment issue - the right to remain silent - it failed to answer the Sixth Amendment issue - the right to counsel. In July 1989, the Supreme Court vacated Powell's death sentence.

Under the law in Texas at the time, if an appeals court vacated a capital murder defendant's death sentence, the only way the state could have the death penalty reimposed was through an entirely new trial. So, the state retried Powell, and he was convicted by a new jury in November 1991 and sentenced to death for a second time.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals vacated Powell's second death sentence in December 1994 because the trial court's instructions to the jury were inadequate. By this time, the law had been changed so that when a death sentence was thrown out, the guilty verdict remained in force, so the state could request a new punishment hearing without having to retry the defendant's guilt. A new punishment hearing was held, and Powell was sentenced to death for the third time in November 1999. All of his subsequent appeals in state and federal court were denied.

For most of his 32 years on death row, Powell declined interview requests from reporters, while his lawyers attempted with each new hearing to shift as much of the blame for Ablanedo's murder as possible to Sheila Meinert. In December 2009, however, as his appeals began to run out, Powell wrote a letter to the victim's family. "I am infinitely sorry that I killed Ralph Ablanedo," he wrote. "I shot Officer Ablanedo and I take responsibility for his death. In a few frightful seconds, I stole from you and the world the precious and irreplaceable life of a good man ... There is no excuse for what I did."

The week before his execution, Powell's attorneys filed appeals asking that the death sentence be reduced to life in prison. They claimed that in his more than 30 years on death row, Powell was a model inmate who exhibited "exemplary and humane behavior", contradicting the jury's finding that he posed a future danger to society. Prosecutors countered that the juries in 1991 and 1999 considered evidence of Powell's good behavior in prison and still sentenced him to death. State and federal courts rejected the appeals. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles also unanimously declined his request for a reduced sentence.

Bruce Mills eventually married Ablanedo's widow, Judy, and adopted their two sons. They and other family members were escorted by Austin police officers to attend the execution.

Powell kept his eyes locked on the victim's family as the execution was being administered, but he did not acknowledge the warden's invitation to make a last statement. He was pronounced dead at 6:10 p.m.

In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty law in every state was unconstitutional. Texas commuted the sentences of every death row prisoner and passed a new death penalty statute in 1973. When Powell arrived on death row in 1978, no one had yet been executed under the new law. Since then, 459 prisoners have been executed before him. About half that many have had their sentences commuted or overturned, and 36 have died from other causes. Powell was one of only twelve prisoners remaining on Texas' death row who committed their capital offenses in the 1970's.

Before Powell, the longest time a prisoner served on death row before being executed was 24 years. Robert Excell White killed a store owner and two customers in a robbery in 1974, and was executed in 1999.

Five prisoners have been on death row longer than Powell. Two of them, Raymond Riles and Clarence Jordan, are considered mentally incompetent and ineligible for execution. Ronald Chambers and Anthony Pierce both had their death sentences vacated by the federal courts in 2008, and the state is seeking to have them reimposed. No recent information on the fifth, Harvey Earvin, was available for this report.

By David Carson. Posted on 16 June 2010.
Sources: Texas Attorney General's office, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, court documents, Austin American-Statesman, Fort Worth Star-Telegram.