HOUSTON - The conviction and death sentence of a man arrested nearly 19 years after an 11-year-old Fort Worth girl was raped and strangled in her home was upheld Wednesday by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
The wife of Juan Segundo, 45, was a family friend of Vanessa Villa, who was found dead in 1986 in her home. A DNA match in a national database tied Segundo to her slaying. He was tried and convicted of capital murder in December 2006.
In a second case Wednesday, the state's highest criminal appeals court also upheld the conviction and death sentence of a San Antonio man, Joe Michael Luna, 29. Luna was condemned for death of Michael Andrade, a St. Mary's University student killed during a burglary of his apartment in 2005.
The court also rejected another appeal from an Argentine whose first death sentence was overturned because of improper racial testimony. A federal judge threw out Victor Saldano's original 1996 conviction in Collin County because a psychologist testified his Hispanic background made him likely to be a future danger to society.
A new punishment trial in 2004 returned him to death row.
In his latest appeal, he raised eight claims challenging the validity of his death sentence for the robbery and fatal shooting of a man abducted from a Dallas grocery store. Saldano's case has been widely publicized in Argentina, which does not allow capital punishment.
In another case involving a foreign national, the court Wednesday returned to the trial court in Houston a challenge to the age of condemned murderer Bernardo Tercero, a Nicaraguan man convicted of fatally shooting a man in Harris County in March 1997 during robbery at a dry cleaner store.
Lawyers for Tercero say they have a document showing he was under 18 at the time of the shooting and would now be ineligible for execution under U.S. Supreme Court standards. Texas prison records show he was born Aug. 20, 1976. The indictment lists his birth as Aug. 20, 1977. The latest appeal document lists his birth as Aug. 20, 1979.
The appeals court asked the trial court to sort out the discrepancies.
In the Fort Worth case, Segundo previously had served time in prison for burglary for breaking into homes of two women and trying to rape them and for driving while intoxicated. He was arrested in 2005 at his home in Johnson County, south of Fort Worth, for the girl's death.
The break in the so-called "cold case" murder came when a database called the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, linked semen taken from Vanessa's body to Segundo.
DNA evidence also tied Segundo to the rapes and strangling of two other women in the Fort Worth area in 1994 and 1995. Tarrant County prosecutors described him as a sexual sadist and serial killer.
Evidence showed he had attended the Villa girl's wake and signed the guest book. Segundo's wife had worked with the victim's mother and aunt at a nursing home and authorities determined he sometimes would drive his wife to their house.
In his appeal, Segundo raised 19 points of error from his trial, including challenges to evidence of the 1995 rape, questions about the charges delivered by the judge to his jury, jury instructions and questions about jury selection. His appeal also challenged the taking of blood samples while he was in prison, the introduction of parole revocation documents at his trial and the constitutionality of the Texas death penalty statute and lethal injection procedures.
Segundo was paroled from prison in July 1989 but returned again in 1991 following a burglary conviction. He was paroled again in January 1993 but was sentenced to five years in prison in September 1995 for felony driving while intoxicated. He was released on mandatory supervision in June 2000 and discharged from parole a month later.
In the San Antonio case, Luna pleaded guilty at the start of his capital murder trial to killing Andrade, 21, who lived in an apartment next door to Luna's girlfriend.
The plea left his jury only with a decision on punishment. During punishment phase testimony, Luna took the stand and asked jurors to sentence him to death.
Evidence showed he crawled through a common attic space to get into his victim's apartment. Andrade was strangled and a picture of him and a computer were taken, then the place was set on fire.
Luna already was in jail, arrested on warrants related to other home burglaries, when he was charged with the slaying.
In his appeal, he raised 25 points of error from his trial, including questions about whether he should have had a competency hearing related to his guilty plea, challenges to his jury charge, to evidence seized from an apartment where he spent a night, to testimony from a victims in previous crimes, and constitutional challenges to the Texas death penalty statute.
