Mario Marquez was executed by the State of Texas for a double murder
According to court documents Mario Marquez would end the relationship with his wife because he believed she was unfaithful. After the split Marquez would go to her home and would murder her and her niece. Both women would be sexually assaulted before they were murdered
Mario Marquez would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Mario Marquez would be executed by lethal injection on January 17 1995
There was controversy surrounding this execution as Marquez reported IQ was 65
Mario Marquez Photos
Mario Marquez Case
The life of Mario Marquez, a life his lawyer called “sadness from beginning to end,” was ended by lethal injection at 12:21 A.M. today, a short time after the condemned man said he wanted to “come home to my Lord Jesus, my savior.”
Mr. Marquez, who killed his former wife and her niece in a jealous rage 11 years ago, gasped deeply, strained once against the straps, then lay still as a dozen or so somber witnesses, including six reporters, watched through a glass partition. Among the onlookers were two brothers, who wept quietly in each other’s arms, and his lawyer, who said his client had been victimized by a “Catch-22” in the law.
The lawyer, Robert L. McGlasson, said his client was a grade-school dropout with an I.Q. of 65. The 10th of 16 children born to a migrant farm worker and his wife, Mr. Marquez had been repeatedly beaten with a horse whip by his father, then abandoned to the streets and a life of drug abuse when he was 12, his lawyer said.
As he had through years of futile appeals, Mr. McGlasson said today that inconsistencies in the law had kept the jury from hearing evidence of the defendant’s dreadful childhood and later mental problems, then prevented that evidence from being effectively used on appeal
Mr. Marquez, a 36-year-old former construction worker, was tried and convicted only of raping and strangling his former wife’s 14-year-old niece in San Antonio on Jan. 27, 1984. But there was never any question that he also raped and strangled his former wife on that day.
“I am truly sorry, and I am paying with my life tonight for taking these two lives,” he said as he lay on the gurney, a needle in each arm. “I want to come home to my Lord Jesus, my savior.”
As expected, both the Supreme Court and the Governor’s office turned down his final appeals on Monday. While there was little of the urgency that once attended executions, this one brought a sizable contingent of reporters, including Ted Koppel of ABC News.
Along the street near the big orange-brick building where Mr. Marquez was put to death, it had been business as usual, if a bit slower because of the holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
As the sunny, 70-degree day yielded to the chill of evening, there was a forlorn candlelight vigil, as a scant two dozen people gathered under a bright moon across the street. Corrections officers, some wearing 10-gallon hats, chatted affably among themselves and with outsiders as they awaited what for them has become routine
Businesslike and polite with visitors, especially to those about to look on for the first time at the ritual of an execution, the prison officials and corrections officers seemed, although they did not say so, to have more feelings in common with Edwin Springer, the lead prosecutor at Mr. Marquez’s trial.
“He wasn’t so mentally retarded he didn’t know right from wrong,” Mr. Springer said as the execution drew near. “He’s a very dangerous individual. I have no reservations.” Mr. Springer offered reminders that the defendant had attacked another inmate with a ball point pen while in the Bexar County Jail and had threatened to kill a prosecutor during his trial.
Having had enough of the case, perhaps sick of the images of the slain Rebecca Marquez, 19, and her niece Rachel Gutierrez, Mr. Springer chose not to attend the execution. (The Department of Criminal Justice does not allow victims’ relatives to watch executions, for fear of confrontations with the defendants’ kin.)
“This was a disturbing blight on our civilized society,” Mr. McGlasson said from his office in Austin hours after his client had become the 87th man put to death by Texas since 1982.
Mr. McGlasson said his appeals had been frustrated by the fact that the trial jury did not hear evidence in 1984 of the defendant’s mental impairment because, under a Texas statute then in effect, that evidence could have been used only to bolster arguments that he should be executed
That statute was later declared defective, Mr. McGlasson said, but appellate courts nevertheless refused on several occasions to weigh evidence of mental impairment because it had never been submitted to a jury.
Acknowledging a 1989 Supreme Court ruling that the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment did not prohibit the execution of adults with the reasoning capacity of children, Mr. McGlasson said the Texas Legislature was considering a bill to curb executions of people deemed to be retarded.
“All we were asking for was some time,” said the lawyer, who works with the Texas Resource Center, a group specializing in death-penalty appeals.
Mario Marquez‘s time ran out in a small room with pale blue walls, several hours after a last meal of fried chicken and after visits with his sons and daughters and brothers and sisters. “I am sorry for all of the burden that I caused my family,” he said from the gurney.
Later, outside the prison, a small crowd that had gathered as time for the execution neared, applauded the end of the life that had brought him and those close to him so much grief.
