Danalynn Recer on the Quintero verdict

Yesterday evening the missus and I had dinner with a friend from our college days, Houston attorney Danalynn Recer, founder of the Gulf Regional Advocacy Center. She's taking a break in Austin after concluding the long and grueling capital murder trial of Juan Quntero last week, an illegal immigrant copkiller who jurors gave a sentence of life without parole (LWOP), a verdict that surprised many court watchers.

The Quintero trial wasn't about guilt or innocence, but entirely about what sentence to give out: life without parole or the death penalty. Dana barely spoke to the press during the trial, much to their chagrin, so I appreciated that she agreed to a short interview about the Quintero case for Grits.

Speculation has abounded since the verdict, including on this blog, about why the jury voted they way they did, but Recer thinks that "if people want to take a lesson from this case, they should take the jurors at their word" when one of them declared, "I believe he has value ... He's loved by many of his family and friends, and that was number one." She said the jury simply lived up to their duty identified by the Supreme Court to issue a verdict based on a "reasoned moral response."

Quintero was "so remorseful and self-hating over the incident," said Recer, that he seriously considered becoming a "volunteer," i.e., simply acquiescing in a death sentence in order to punish himself and avoid life in prison. Quintero's two teenage daughters talked him into going to trial and participating in the "mitigation" defense, Recer said, which allowed his lawyers to dig deep into his personal life and medical history. They convinced him that "his life is not over, he's still a Dad."

Asked why Quintero committed this unspeakable act, Recer said the bottom line was he was afraid, and reacted in the heat of a panic attack, responding to a "threat that didn't exist." Quintero has a chronic anxiety disorder, she said, and self-medicated with alcohol. (Quintero drank daily on a scale that could only be defined as gross alcoholism - up to a case of beer a day.) To that extent, she said ironically, one psych expert believed Quintero may not have shot Officer Johnson if he wasn't sober (!).

Recer also believes that a childhood brain trauma contributed to the circumstances, though she acknowledges many people were dismissive of the claim when it was raised by the defense. The frontal lobe injury, she said, made him cling to routines and caused him panic attacks when confronted with the unexpected. Then he found himself in a most unexpected, un-routine circumstance - arrested at a traffic stop for reasons he didn't understand, sitting in the back of a police car with a gun hidden in his belt - and she thinks the brain injuries inhibited his decision making functions during those critical moments.

Finally, Recer said some of the information that might have better explained Quintero's mindset was excluded or made unavailable because prosecutors went after his employer and family members on other charges, making them unavailable or unwilling to participate in Quintero's trial. However, she said over the three months leading up to the shooting Quintero had become increasingly paranoid and irrational, as well as fearful and distrustful of police, mostly from hearing second hand accounts of abuse or alleged corruption, and from his experience with police in Mexico.

None of this justifies Quintero's actions, Recer said, which is why his lawyers did not contest the elements of the offense and only argued over the correct sentence. But she believed all these were contributing factors; they were the reasons for what happened, even if no one can point to a single good reason for shooting a police officer in the back.

Given these "bad facts," what explains the verdict? Recer believes the case shows people in Harris County "are not as bloodthirsty as we're generally led to believe." In voir dire (jury selection), lawyers vetted 126 jurors, and by a 5-1 margin jurors were excluded because they refused to consider the death penalty compared to those who said they would refuse to consider life. She thinks Harris County DA's office "misunderstands its constituency," and that the jury they got was essentially representative of their jury pool and the citizenry at large.

She did say, however, that the Batson and Miller El cases from the US Supreme Court, which limited prosecutorial jury strikes based on race, kept the prosecution from using pre-emptory strikes as aggressively as in the past. So in that sense, I asked, is it fair to say you didn't win the case at jury selection but the prosecution lost it there? "Possibly," she nodded. "There were a lot of reasons, plus a lot of luck, but jury selection was big." The jury "was a necessary but not sufficient condition," she said, for getting the LWOP verdict.

Recer said they'd tried unsuccessfully to convince the state to agree to a plea and avoid an expensive, drawn-out and unnecessary trial. She was roundly criticized for releasing that information to the media, which reinforced her inclination, she said, simply to tell the press nothing at all. Recer said the proffer had been discussed in open court as well as written pleadings, and the fact it had been made wasn't privileged.

In any event, the time came when Quintero's lawyers got a meeting with the Harris County DA's Office, where they hoped to present most of the mitigation evidence that later went to the jury. She was amazed, she said, the state's lawyers didn't just shut up and listen to their opponent's case, even if they intended to go to trial. After all, the defense presentation amounted to "free discovery." But Chuck Rosenthal, himself representing the office at the meeting, was openly dismissive that anything could mitigate the crime, shutting down discussion before she'd even laid out her evidence. If he'd let the meeting continue, she said, at least they "would have known what's coming."

Recer believes the verdict reflects changing public attitudes generally toward the death penalty, as well as changes in the law. The Legislature's decision to make LWOP the only alternative to a death sentence played a big role in the jury's verdict, she thinks. But their experience in voir dire makes her believe the pendulum may be swinging away from more punitive public attitudes in the '90s.

One last thing I should mention: A recurring theme throughout our talk was Recer's displeasure with reporters covering the case. She said MSM journalism focuses solely on generating conflict to sell newspapers, so they wanted to portray every story as filled with conflict as possible. In fact, she said, Quintero's defense granted most of the facts alleged by the state, and there was little real disagreement. She considers the sentencing phase of the trial a function of "nonviolent conflict resolution" that becomes distorted by the media formula of conflicting "balanced" quotes on "opposing" sides. Everyone in the courtroom was really on the same side, she said. They all knew what Quintero did was wrong and were all seeking justice.

Photo via the Houston Chronicle/Billy Smith.