Texas executed Ramiro Gonzales on Wednesday despite a stunning reversal from a psychiatrist who helped send him to death row 17 years ago.
Gonzales, 41, was killed by lethal injection as punishment for kidnapping, raping and murdering Bridget Townsend when they were both 18. At the time, Gonzales was struggling with drug addiction. He killed Townsend, his drug dealer’s girlfriend, while trying to steal drugs. He had turned 18 two months before the killing, making him barely old enough to be legally eligible to be sentenced to death.
Townsend “was a beautiful person who loved life and loved people,” her mother, Patricia Townsend, previously told USA Today. “Every time she was with somebody she hadn’t seen in awhile, she had to hug ‘em.” Townsend described Gonzales’ execution as a “joyful occasion” for her family, noting that it took place on her daughter’s birthday.
Texas is the only state that requires jurors to determine that the defendant is likely to commit criminal acts of violence that would “constitute a continuing threat to society” in order to impose a death sentence. During Gonzales’ 2006 trial, psychiatrist Edward Gripon testified that Gonzales derived pleasure from acts of sexual violence and was unlikely to stop or be rehabilitated.
Fifteen years later, Gripon reevaluated Gonzales and reversed his assessment, citing his prior reliance on a debunked statistic and witness testimony that has since been recanted. It was the first time the psychiatrist had issued a report changing his opinion in a death penalty case, Gripon told The Marshall Project in 2022.
Texas Defender Service/Elisabetta Diorio
Like most people on death row, Gonzales experienced abuse and neglect as a child. His mother, who was 17 when he was born, struggled with drug and alcohol addiction and turned Gonzales over to her parents, according to a petition for clemency, which the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected earlier this month. The first time Gonzales met his father was when he was 19 and they were both locked up in the county jail.
Starting at the age of 6, Gonzales was repeatedly sexually abused, including by a cousin. One of the few family members Gonzales felt close to, his aunt Loretta, was killed in a car accident when he was 15. He turned to cocaine and methamphetamine to cope with the grief, and dropped out of school, stealing and forging checks to pay for drugs.
Two months after his 18th birthday, Gonzales decided to rob his drug dealer’s home. When Townsend, who was alone inside, tried to call her boyfriend, Gonzales assaulted and killed her. After he was arrested for sexually assaulting a different woman, Gonzales confessed to killing Townsend.
“He doesn’t deserve mercy,” Patricia Townsend told USA Today. “And his childhood should not have anything to do with it. I know a lot of people that had a hard childhood … He made his choice.”
Gonzales was previously scheduled to be executed in 2022. Shortly before his execution date, Gripon provided Gonzales’ appellate lawyers with his reevaluation report, in which he acknowledged errors in his trial testimony.
In 2006, Gripon had testified that recidivism rates among people who commit sex offenses are as high as 80%. In his second report, he described how that number was later traced back to a 1986 Psychology Today article and found to be baseless.
Gripon also initially relied on written statements from Gonzales’ cellmate, Frederick Ozuna, that described Gonzales confessing to returning to the crime scene several times to have “sex with the body.” In a sworn declaration, Ozuna later recanted those statements, stating that an officer threatened him with a harsher sentence if he didn’t cooperate against Gonzales.
“With the passage of time and significant maturity [Gonzales] is now a significantly different person both mentally and emotionally,” Gripon wrote in his 2022 report. “At the current time, considering all of the evidence provided to me, my evaluation of Mr. Gonzales, and his current mental status, it is my opinion, to a reasonable psychiatric probability, that he does not pose a threat of future danger to society in regard to any predictable future acts of criminal violence.”
Two days before Gonzales’ 2022 execution date, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted a stay and instructed the trial court to consider Gonzales’ claim that his death sentence resulted from false expert testimony. Without conducting a hearing or reviewing additional evidence, the court signed verbatim the state’s “findings of fact and conclusions of law” and denied relief. (This is not unusual: a 2018 report published in the Harvard Law Review found that judges adopted prosecutors’ findings in their entirety in 96% of the 191 cases the authors reviewed in Harris County, Texas.)
During Gonzales’ 18 years on death row, “He has earnestly devoted himself to self-improvement, contemplation, and prayer, and has grown into a mature, peaceful, kind, loving, and deeply religious adult,” his lawyers wrote in a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that Gonzales was ineligible for execution because there was no risk or probability of him posing a threat to society. “He acknowledges his responsibility for his crimes and has sought to atone for them and to seek redemption through his actions.”
Gonzales earned the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree from a Bible college and was one of the first peer coordinators when Texas death row introduced “faith-based pods.” In that role, Gonzales offered spiritual guidance to others facing execution.
The Supreme Court declined to intervene to halt Gonzales’ execution. Gonzales was the eighth person executed in the U.S. this year. On Thursday, Oklahoma plans to execute Richard Norman Rojem Jr.
In an interview with The Marshall Project days before his death, Gonzales addressed the tension between rehabilitating people only to execute them.
“I think ultimately the state is afraid to acknowledge the fact that we can be rehabilitated and be a contribution to society from prison — because it goes against how they prosecuted us, how they labeled us in court as menaces to society,” Gonzales said. “I wish they’d be honest and say: ‘We screwed up. People can be rehabilitated.’ But it’s hard to admit your mistakes, especially when politics are involved.”