A former Austin drifter was executed Thursday evening for the rape-slaying of a Minnesota woman attacked on a jogging trail eight years ago. David Martinez received lethal injection for the 1997 killing of Kiersa Paul, a 24-year-old former art student who said she was going to meet him at a popular Austin park.
Kiersa Paul
"Only the sky and green grass goes on forever, and today is a good day to die," Martinez said in a brief statement before being put to death. As the drugs began taking effect, Martinez sputtered and gasped several times before losing consciousness. He was pronounced dead at 6:17 p.m., eight minutes after the drugs began flowing into his arms. Paul's parents came from Bloomington, Minn. They held hands with another of their daughters, and watched through a window a few feet away from Martinez. He made brief eye contact but said nothing to them. As other witnesses, including his mother, entered a chamber viewing area, Martinez nodded and smiled. Martinez, 29, was the 10th condemned prisoner to receive lethal injection this year in Texas, the nation's most active capital punishment state. Attorneys tried to block the execution with an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that prosecutors in Travis County should have done more to investigate claims of Martinez's abusive childhood. Jurors who determined he should be put to death should have had more of that information so they could have better considered whether a life prison term would have been more appropriate, lawyers said in their appeals. Moments before Martinez was scheduled to die, the high court rejected the appeals. Martinez was convicted of capital murder for the death of Paul, a University of Minnesota sophomore art student who came to Austin to visit her sister in late 1996 and decided to extend her stay. She'd found work as a cashier at an Austin bakery and apparently met Martinez through mutual friends. Eight years ago last week, Paul told her sister she was heading out on her bicycle to a popular Austin park along the Barton Creek greenbelt to meet someone she knew only as "Wolf," which was Martinez's nickname. The next morning, her body was found by a jogger. She'd been raped and strangled, had her throat cut at least eight times and had an "X" carved into her chest. Martinez was arrested days later. A Travis County jury deliberated only 15 minutes at his 1998 trial before convicting him of capital murder. Two weeks later, they decided he should be put to death.
"The case on guilt-innocence was fairly overwhelming," Darla Davis, a Travis County assistant district attorney who was one of the trial prosecutors, said Wednesday. "We had DNA, we had hair consistent with his in her hand, he had her belongings, and he had a knife with her blood on it." "Sometimes in capital cases, the issue is not going to be whether he's guilty or not," Bill White, one of Martinez's trial lawyers, said. "The issue was the punishment issue. "Our goal was to bring forward evidence in terms of his own life in his family and how he grew up and the circumstances that certainly were not the best. ... My idea was to try to talk them out of death." Court documents indicated Martinez's mother may have abused and neglected him. Their house was filled with bird feces. His father was living elsewhere in an openly gay relationship and involved in the manufacture of sadomasochistic sex toys. When he stayed there, he also may have been abused. Later, Martinez at times lived on the streets of Austin. Appeals lawyers tracked down his father, but they said he refused to cooperate. He also had refused to testify at Martinez's trial. At the time of the slaying, Martinez was on probation for a 1995 conviction for possession of an explosive device, a homemade hand grenade police found in his car during a traffic stop. At least eight other Texas death row inmates have execution dates, two in each of the next four months. After Martinez, next on the schedule is Gary Sterling, set to die Aug. 10 for the 1988 robbery and slaying of a Navarro County man.
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