Leonard Rojas was executed by the State of Texas for a double murder
According to court documents Leonard Rojas thought that his girlfriend was sleeping with his brother: JoAnne Reed and David Rojas. Leonard would fatally shoot JoAnne Reed and then would fatally shoot David Rojas
Leonard Rojas would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Leonard Rojas would be executed by lethal injection on December 4 2002
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When Was Leonard Rojas Executed
Leonard Rojas was executed on December 4 2002
Leonard Rojas Case
Leonard Uresti Rojas, sentenced to death in a Johnson County trial for the 1994 murders of his brother and common law wife, is scheduled to be executed Wednesday evening in the death chamber of the Huntsville “Walls” Unit. While the case against Rojas, now 52, appears strong, his current defense team hopes legal blunders by a previous court-appointed attorney will lead to a stay of execution.
Leonard Rojas freely admits to shooting Jo Ann Reed and his brother David Rojas in the early morning hours of Dec. 27, 1994. Leonard Rojas — who had served time for previous drug-related offenses in California and Nevada — returned to the double-wide trailer the three called home high on drugs and noticed Reed slip out of his brother’s room. Leonard Rojas confronted Reed and accused her of sleeping with his brother, a claim she denied. After the two had sex, Leonard Rojas pulled out a .32-caliber gun and shot Reed in the face.
Leonard Rojas left their bedroom and went to the bathroom, where his brother was at the time, and called him out. David Rojas was shot three times by his brother and was left to die on the floor. Upon returning to his bedroom, Leonard Rojas noticed Reed was still breathing, so he tied a plastic bag over her head and stacked pillows and blankets on her body. Shortly afterward, Rojas decided to flee the small town of Alvarado, approximately 30 miles south of Fort Worth. After hitchhiking to a Fort Worth bus station, he bought a ticket to Atlanta. However, a crisis of conscience caused Rojas to get off the bus in Dallas, where he found a security guard and confessed to the killings. He later provided three nearly identical confessions to authorities and gave a detailed walk-through of the crime scene.
On May 22, 1996, Rojas was found guilty of the murders and was sentenced to death nine days later. All of his previous attempts to have his death sentence either stayed or changed to a life sentence have been rejected by the courts, but his attorneys from the Texas Defender Service have filed an appeal claiming a previous appeal was “woefully inadequate.” Their complaint claims that attorney David Chapman of Fort Worth, appointed by the court to handle a previous appeal, bungled the case. In a sworn affidavit, Chapman said he prepared his state habeas appeal — intended to raise issues that might not have been brought up during the original trial — after reading the trial record and interviewing Rojas once. Further, they argue, Chapman was inexperienced in handling capital cases — the appeal was his first — and that his law license was suspended three different times for mishandling three other cases.
Chapman, on the other hand, contends he did the best he could with very little to work with. “I played a very bad hand as well as I could,” he told The Houston Chronicle. “The facts of Mr. Rojas’ case were extraordinarily incriminating.”
Rojas’ own statements from death row may damage his attempts to gain a stay. During interviews with the Associated Press, He expressed no remorse for the killings, although he now claims Reed was trying to kill him slowly by poisoning his coffee. Barring a stay of execution due to the appeal or a decision by the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole or Gov. Rick Perry, Rojas will be executed sometime after 6 p.m. His execution is the next to last scheduled in the state this year.
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