Herrera v. Collins

Decades after the trial and lynching of Leo Frank, the Supreme Court began expanding constitutional rights for criminal defendants and the role of Federal courts in protecting those rights. Most Americans were horrified by mob violence at trials, lynchings and unreliable police interrogations, however public opinion eventually turned against the expanded use of so-called "eleventh hour" habeas petitions that delayed executions without making a credible claim of innocence. The appointment of William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, and three new justices appointed by Ronald Reagan, including the influential conservative Antonin Scalia, signaled a new direction for the Supreme Court. In 1990 Rehnquist gave a speech recasting the death penalty debate in terms of federalism (sometimes called "the New Federalism"):{{cite book |last=Coyle |first=Marcia |title=A Year in the Life of the Supreme Court |date=1995 |publisher=Duke University Press |chapter=A Question of Innocence |pages=149-156}}

The essence of the question is not the pros and cons of capital punishment, but the pros and cons of federalism....What is the proper balance between the lawful authority of the states and the role of the federal courts in protecting constitutional rights?

Controversy over the death penalty and disagreements over procedural protections intensified as the death row population grew from around 600 inmates in 1980 to over 2,200 by 1989. Studies and academic research found troubling evidence of errors in state trials, casting doubt on conservative theories. Supporters of habeas did not find these arguments persuasive enough to weaken safeguards. They pointed out that capital defendants who received death sentences were almost always poor, and represented by inexperienced attorneys who were expected to do full-scale investigations with insufficient resources.Coyle (2016), pp. 157-158

Despite lingering opposition from habeas supporters, the Court by 1989 had decided dozens of cases to restrict federal habeas review of constitutional errors. It was against this backdrop that Leonel Herrera filed his first round of unsuccessful habeas petitions. However, a claim of factual innocence was different from other types of claims that were increasingly criticized as "abuse of the writ".Herrera {{ussc|506|390|1993|pin=397}} In 1990, after five years of failed petitions, with the help of new counsel Herrera claimed that newly discovered evidence would prove his innocence.Coyle (2016), pp. 159-160

On September 29, 1981, Texas Department of Public Safety Officer David Rucker was shot and killed along a stretch of highway a few miles north of Brownsville, Texas in the Rio Grande Valley. Rucker's body, discovered by a passerby, was lying beside his patrol car. He had been shot in the head. Around the same time, Los Fresnos police officer Enrique Carrisalez observed a speeding vehicle traveling on the same road away from where Rucker's body had been found. Carrisalez and his civilian friend, Enrique Hernandez, turned on the patrol car's flashing red lights and pursued the vehicle, which pulled over. Carrisalez took a flashlight and walked toward the car. The driver of the vehicle opened his door and exchanged words with Carrisalez before firing at least one shot at Carrisalez's chest. He died eight days later on October 7, 1981. Former U.S. Navy and Vietnam veteran Leonel Torres Herrera (September 17, 1947 – May 12, 1993) was arrested and charged with the capital murder of both Carrisalez and Rucker.{{cite news |title=The case of Leonel Herrera |url=https://www.amnesty.org/fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/amr510341993en.pdf |access-date=9 April 2025 |work=Amnesty International |publisher=INTERNATIONAL SECRETARIAT |date=April 1993}}

Before he died, Carrisalez also identified Herrera as the person who shot him from a single photograph shown to him in the hospital. The license plate of the vehicle from which the gunman emerged was traced back to Herrera's live-in girlfriend, a car that local law officers knew Herrera drove on occasion. Carrisalez's civilian friend, Enrique Hernandez, testified that only one person was in the car when Carrisalez was shot.

Other evidence showed that Herrera's Social Security card had been found alongside Rucker's patrol car on the night he was killed. Splatters of blood on the car identified by Carrisalez's friend as the vehicle involved in the shootings were found to be type A blood, the same as Rucker's. Blood on Herrera's pants and wallet was likewise discovered to be type A. Last, a handwritten letter was found on Herrera when he was arrested which "strongly implied" that he had killed Rucker.{{cite web |title=Herrera v. Collins |url=https://www.oyez.org/cases/1992/91-7328 |website=Oyez |publisher=Cornell Law School |access-date=9 April 2025 |date=25 January 1993}}

In January 1982, Herrera was tried for the murder of Carrisalez. At the trial, Carrisalez' partner identified Herrera as the person who shot Carrisalez. The jury found Herrera guilty of the capital murder of Carrisalez, for which he was sentenced to death. Later that year, Herrera pleaded guilty to the murder of Rucker.

Herrera, represented by new counsel, filed a second habeas petition claiming actual innocence. Herrera's new lawyer was an experienced capital defense attorney, and conducted a full investigation into the case. He contacted Hector Villarreal, an attorney who had represented Herrera's brother Raul Herrera, Sr., who told him that Raul had privately admitted to killing Rucker and Carrisalez. Raul claimed to be part of a drug trafficking ring that was working with law enforcement, and said Rucker was killed when a deal he was working went awry. The second affidavit was from Raul's former cellmate Juan Franco Palacious who said Raul confessed while in jail.Coyle (2016), pp. 161-162

The state court found that "no evidence at trial remotely suggested" that anyone else killed Carrisalez, and denied the habeas petition. The lawyers gathered even more evidence to support the petition, including an affidavit from Raul Herrera Jr. who was nine-years old at the time of the murders, which he claimed to have witnessed. The United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas.The granted a stay of execution to allow Herrera to present his claim of innocence in state courts.Coyle (2016), pp. 162-163 The state attorney general appealed the stay to the Fifth Circuit, which ruled against Hererra.{{cite web |title=Leonel Torres Herrera v. James A. Collins, Director, Texas Department of Criminal Justice |url=https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/954/1029/128263/ |website=Justia US Law |publisher=United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit |access-date=9 April 2025 |date=18 February 1992}}

With only hours left until his execution, Herrera's lawyer drafted a petition for certiorari. The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari at 6:15 A.M. on February 19, 1992, but refused to stay the execution. The Texas trial court attempted to set the new execution date before the Supreme Court could hear the case, but this was stopped by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in a decision noting that the Supreme Court had already dismissed one death penalty appeal from Texas as moot because the inmate was executed while his Supreme Court case was still pending.Coyle (2016), pp. 164-165

Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s majority opinion held that a claim of actual innocence based on newly discovered evidence did not state a ground for federal habeas relief. Herrera had claimed that, because the new evidence demonstrated innocence, his execution would violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment which applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. Rehnquist’s opinion noted that “[f]ew rulings would be more disruptive of our federal system than to provide for federal habeas review of freestanding claims of actual innocence.” Rehnquist’s opinion, although not explicitly holding that the Eighth Amendment does not prohibit executing an innocent person, emphasized that Herrera was not raising a constitutional violation. In discussing what relief Herrera would be entitled to were he to succeed on his claim of “actual innocence,” Rehnquist wrote:

Were petitioner to satisfy the dissent's ‘probable innocence’ standard…the District Court would presumably be required to grant a conditional order of relief, which would in effect require the State to retry petitioner 10 years after his first trial, not because of any constitutional violation which had occurred at the first trial, but simply because of a belief that in light of petitioner's new-found evidence a jury might find him not guilty at a second trial.

Rehnquist’s opinion also held that Texas courts’ refusal to even consider Herrera’s newly discovered evidence did not violate due process and suggested that Herrera file a clemency petition with the Texas Board of Pardon and Paroles.{{cite web |title=Leonel Torres HERRERA, Petitioner v. James A. COLLINS, Director, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Institutional Division |url=https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/506/390 |website=Legal Information Institute |publisher=Cornell Law School |access-date=9 April 2025 |date=25 January 1993}}

Justice O'Connor wrote a concurring opinion. Although she joined the majority opinion, in her concurring opinion, O'Connor wrote that "the execution of a legally and factually innocent person would be a constitutionally intolerable event." Dispositive for Justice O'Connor, however, was that "[Herrera was] not innocent in any sense of the word." O'Connor took the position that Herrera could not be "legally and factually innocent" because he "was tried before a jury of his peers, with the full panoply of protections that our Constitution affords criminal defendants. At the conclusion of that trial, the jury found [Herrera] guilty beyond a reasonable doubt." O'Connor reiterated the majority's conclusion that the execution of an innocent person was not unconstitutional by assuming that there was no constitutional issue raised:

Consequently, the issue before us is not whether a State can execute the innocent. It is, as the Court notes, whether a fairly convicted and therefore legally guilty person is constitutionally entitled to yet another judicial proceeding in which to adjudicate his guilt anew, 10 years after conviction, notwithstanding his failure to demonstrate that constitutional error infected his trial. {{Cite web |title=National Archives NextGen Catalog |url=https://catalog.archives.gov/id/122415750 |access-date=2024-03-15 |website=catalog.archives.gov|series=Records of the White House Counsel's Office (George W. Bush Administration) }}

O'Connor concluded by asserting that the majority did not hold that the Constitution permits the execution of an actually innocent person.

Antonin Scalia joined the majority, but added in passing that he found no basis, either in the Constitution or in case law, to conclude that executing an innocent but duly convicted defendant would violate the Eighth Amendment. He sharply criticized the dissenting justices' appeal to conscience:

If the system that has been in place for 200 years (and remains widely approved) "shocks" the dissenters' consciences … perhaps they should doubt the calibration of their consciences, or, better still, the usefulness of "conscience shocking" as a legal test.

Justice Blackmun, joined by Justices Stevens and Souter, dissented. Blackmun believed that "[n]othing could be more contrary to contemporary standards of decency or more shocking to the conscience than to execute a person who is actually innocent." Blackmun would have remanded the case to the district court for a determination as to whether a hearing should be held and to resolve the merits of Herrera's claim of actual innocence.

Chastising the majority for its circumspection, Blackmun wrote, "We really are being asked to decide whether the Constitution forbids the execution of a person who has been validly convicted and sentenced, but who, nonetheless, can prove his innocence with newly discovered evidence," and he took note of "the State of Texas' astonishing protestation to the contrary."

Blackmun argued that the majority's concern with a new trial being less reliable than the original trial missed the point. The question was not whether a new trial would be more reliable than the first trial; it was whether, in light of the new evidence, the first trial was sufficiently reliable to allow the State to execute Herrera. Blackmun would have held that in order to be entitled to relief, a death-sentenced inmate should have to be able to demonstrate that he is probably actually innocent; Blackmun distinguished this from the lower standard of probable reasonable doubt, which is applied to procedural default issues.

Four months after the Court's ruling, Herrera was executed. His last words were: "I am innocent, innocent, innocent. . . . I am an innocent man, and something very wrong is taking place tonight."{{cite web |url=http://www.chiprowe.com/articles/false-justice.html |title=False Justice |accessdate=2010-01-14 |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20091231215103/http://chiprowe.com/articles/false-justice.html |archivedate=2009-12-31 }}{{cite web |url=http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/death_row/dr_info/hererraleonellast.html |title=Texas Department of Criminal Justice |accessdate=2013-07-02}}

• List of people executed in Texas, 1990–1999
• List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 506

{{reflist}}

• {{caselaw source

| case = Herrera v. Collins, {{ussc|506|390|1993|el=no}}

| findlaw = https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/506/390.html

| justia =https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/506/390/

| loc =http://cdn.loc.gov/service/ll/usrep/usrep506/usrep506390/usrep506390.pdf

| oyez =https://www.oyez.org/cases/1992/91-7328

}}

• [https://web.archive.org/web/20091231215103/http://chiprowe.com/articles/false-justice.html False justice]
• [https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Huma/HumaLine.htm Executing the Innocent]

Category:United States Supreme Court cases

Category:United States Supreme Court cases of the Rehnquist Court

Category:Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause and death penalty case law

Category:Capital punishment in Texas

Category:1993 in United States case law