A Texas man was executed Wednesday night after a last-minute plea for clemency was denied. The plea said he had undergone a “complete transformation of character” by serving as a spiritual leader to other prisoners and no longer posed a threat to the public.
Ramiro Gonzales, 41, has been on death row in Medina County, Texas, since 2006, when he was convicted of the 2001 murder of 18-year-old Bridget Townsend. Gonzales, who was also 18 at the time, kidnapped, raped and then shot Townsend after she tried to steal drugs from her boyfriend’s house.
Now, nearly 20 years later, Gonzales died by lethal injection and was pronounced dead at 6:50 p.m. at Huntsville State Prison, the state Department of Criminal Justice said.
In his final statement before his execution, Gonzales repeatedly apologized to the Townsend family and stressed that he “never stopped praying for their forgiveness.”
“I cannot express in words the pain I have caused all of you, the grief I have taken from you and which I cannot give back,” he said, according to officials.
“I hope this apology is enough. I lived the rest of my life for you, as best I could, to make amends, to take responsibility,” Gonzales said. “I never stopped praying that you would forgive me and that one day I would have the opportunity to apologize.”
In appeals before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court, his lawyers emphasized how Gonzales had improved his character.
Among other things, his lawyers say, Gonzales has worked through years of childhood trauma to recognize his actions and show remorse. They say he has built meaningful relationships and even turned to Christianity.
“Ramiro has become a respected man of faith among his fellow inmates, and his devotions have been read over the prison radio station and shared during services at the United Church of Canada,” his lawyers said in their brief to the Texas Court of Appeals.
They say Gonazle’s childhood and teenage years were painfully marked by physical and sexual abuse. His lawyers claim his mother “frequently drank alcohol, sniffed spray paint and abused drugs throughout her pregnancy.”
Despite these challenges, his lawyers are convinced that he has now matured and is developing “deep and genuine religious faith, sincere remorse and meaningful attachment to positive, prosocial people.”
But the main argument, his lawyers say, is that a psychiatrist changed his perception of Gonzales as a “potentially dangerous person.” At the time of the murder trial, psychiatrist Dr. Edward Gripon testified that Gonzales was likely to pose a future danger to society based on a statistic he now considers “inaccurate.”
This statistic, which claims an 80 percent recidivism rate among those accused of sex crimes, was written by a consultant with “no qualifications whatsoever” in empirical research and did not include citations from similar studies.
After re-evaluating Gonzales in 2021, Gripon stated that in his view, Gonzales no longer poses a threat going forward.
In their brief to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, Gonazles’ lawyers said his conduct “not only refuted” but “disproved” the predictions made at trial.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday gave no explanation as to why it had rejected his appeal.
