Posted on 07/28/2005 3:58:30 AM PDT by Shawndell Green
Known as 'Wolf,' he met his victim in an Austin park
HUNTSVILLE - When she last spoke with her sister, 24-year-old Kiersa Paul said she was heading out on her bicycle to a popular Austin park to meet a guy she felt sorry for and knew only as "Wolf."
The predator nickname turned out prophetic. The next morning, Paul was found dead. She'd been raped, strangled, her throat cut at least eight times and an "X" etched into her chest.
David Martinez, known as Wolf, was arrested days after the 1997 slaying. Travis County jurors deliberated only 15 minutes before convicting him of capital murder. Two weeks later, they decided he should be put to death.
Martinez, 29, is set for lethal injection this evening. He will be the 10th Texas inmate executed this year.
The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year refused to review his conviction. A petition to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles seeking to commute his sentence to life or grant a 120-day reprieve was rejected Tuesday by a 7-0 vote.
Martinez declined to speak with reporters in the weeks leading up to his punishment.
In a late appeal filed this week, lawyers were challenging whether the Travis County district attorney's office, at the time of Martinez's trial, adequately investigated allegations Martinez was abused as a child. Appeals attorney Gary Taylor argued that results of such an investigation could have persuaded jurors to choose a life prison term rather than death.
Paul, whose family lived in Bloomington, Minn., was a sophomore art student at the University of Minnesota who had come to Austin to visit a sister. She decided to stay, finding work as a cashier at a bakery and apparently meeting Martinez through mutual friends.
Martinez was on probation for a 1995 conviction for possession of an explosive device, a homemade hand grenade police found in his car during a traffic stop.
Defense lawyers presented no witnesses at the guilt-innocence portion of the capital murder trial and focused on trying to save his life by showing he had a mother who abused and neglected him in a home that was covered with bird feces. He left there to live with his father, who was in the business of making homosexual sex toys, according to an affidavit from defense attorneys.
"This was a young man who had a very difficult life," recalled Bill White, one of Martinez's trial lawyers. "He couldn't stay with his mother, he couldn't stay with his father, and he found people who would take him in."
At times, he lived on the streets.
Paul's body was found by a jogger on a greenbelt trail that runs along Barton Creek.
When Martinez was arrested, he had her bicycle, her backpack and a book bag. A roommate who saw Martinez's new bicycle had called police.
DNA tests showed her blood on his pocket knife and his hair and semen on the woman or her clothes. Evidence indicated she had struggled. Authorities found 8-inch-long strands of hair in her hands that had been pulled from her attacker's scalp.
At least eight other Texas death row inmates have execution dates, two in each of the next four months.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
I'm no fan of the death penalty, but what does his abuse as a child have to do with his culpability over the death of this woman? It just does not make any sense. Many killers had unfortunate circumstances growing up, but the vast majority of the people who grow up in similar circumstances never wind up killing anybody. It is not like unfortunate circumstances growing up cause an irresistable compulsion to kill, or anything.
Good riddance, scumbag. (not you... the perp)
I'm against lethal injection. It is an abomination in the fact that it is an easy passing for a fiend. We need firing squads!!!!! No alternatives, just firing squads.
Mike
Good riddence to this guy, and may he rot in hell.
"This was a young man who had a very difficult life,"
Here we go: The same old lame excuse that makes it OK to go butcher a person.
I've always been a fan of good old-fashioned hangings. A firing squad may produce a corpse and blood, but it is over quickly. A hanging may be over just as quick, but the site of the perp's corpse twisting for half an hour serves as a more powerful warning to would-be perps. Sure, it may be just as quick and painless, but would-be perps have got to wonder what happens if the hangman goofs and doesn't drop them far enough for a clean break.
Hanging would be good for this POS.
There's his problem.
Lib death penalty opponents couldn't embrace the cause of a man whose defense tries to portray a gay homelife as one that leads to perversion. They have to let this one by...for the "cause", ya know.
Absolutely NO firing squads. Only public hanging!
I've searched and wasn't able to find a picture of her. It's sad that the killer's name and mugshot show up all over the net, yet, as usual, the victim is forgotten by the media.
How about firing squads made up of the victim's family and friends if they so choose to do it?
Mike
I'd have no problem letting the likes of him hang until the buzzards finish him.
I'm just happy that lethal injection is hanging in there as a method of execution.
The left and the bleeding hearts want to eliminate the death penalty, so let's be grateful for what we've got.
I don't know the count, but I believe most European countries have no executions at all....and maybe many other parts of the world, also.
Leni
They can pull the trap, after giving the perp 50 lashes.
He is a good candidate for a retroactive abortion.
Compassion for the guilty is treason to the innocent.
We fried one in Indiana night before last. He killed 3 of his high school buddies back in 1989 I think.
Well...alrighty then.
Just go out and kill a few people, that'll make it all okay.
Stinking liberal do-gooders, warm-and-fuzzy, kumbaya, birkenstockers are truly sickening in their defenses of these human pieces of dog excrement.
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