Fort Worth Star-Telegram/GettyA death-row inmate in
Texas who murdered a grandmother during a robbery is hoping that his diagnosis of a birth defect caused by exposure to alcohol in the womb will spare him from execution Tuesday evening. Mark Soliz, 37, is set to be the 15th prisoner put to death this year unless he can convince the courts he is mentally disabled and exempt from capital punishment. His lawyers are citing a decision two weeks ago by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which stayed the execution of Dexter Johnson based on new standards for evaluating mental disability.“They’re almost identical,” Soliz’s lawyer, Seth Kretzer, said of the two cases.“It’s simply not right to execute the mentally disabled,” Kretzer said, adding that he knows they may not prevail. “Hope is a very dangerous thing to have in prison. We’ve used every legal tool we can to fight this and now we just have to wait.”Gary Ray Bowles, ‘I-95’ Serial Killer Who Preyed on Gay Men, Executed in FloridaUnder the old medical standards, Soliz’s IQ of more than 70 meant he did not qualify as mentally disabled. But under new criteria, Soliz’s lawyers say his diagnosis of fetal alcohol syndrome should qualify him as mentally disabled and ultimately save him from a lethal dose of pentobarbital. “Because Mr. Soliz suffers from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, he should be categorically exempted from the death penalty under the eighth amendment to the
United States constitution,” his lawyers argued in court documents.“[Fetal alcohol syndrome] is the functional equivalent of the conditions already recognized as disqualifying exemptions to the death penalty such as intellectual disability.”Soliz’s mother was a prostitute who drank and huffed glue during her pregnancy. He scored 75 on his last IQ test, which falls within the 70-84 range considered borderline intellectual functioning, according to an evaluation paid for by his lawyers and reported in the Austin Chronicle. Greg Westfall, who represented Soliz during his 2012 trial, said that in a different jurisdiction, his client would have received a life sentence.“Johnson County has a huge evangelical presence and a large amount of people who believe in the death penalty,” he said, adding, “and there’s racial overtones to the case. He’s a Hispanic who killed a white grandmother.”Soliz’s deadly crime spree began in June 22, 2010, when he and co-defendant Jose Ramos stole several guns. The pair went on to steal from several stores and killed a man in one of the robberies, making a widow of his eight-months pregnant wife. (Ramos pleaded guilty and was given a life sentence for the slaying.)On June 29, 2010, Nancy Weatherly, a grandmother and engineer at an aerospace company in Godley, Texas, heard her doorbell ring around 10:30 a.m. and opened her front door to find Soliz pointing a Hi-Point 9 mm semiautomatic handgun in her face.Soliz brought her inside and began to search the house for valuables. When she asked him not to take her deceased mother’s jewelry box, he told her she would join her mother shortly and shot her in the back of the head. John William King, Racist Who Dragged James Byrd Jr. to Death, Executed in TexasJohnson County Assistant District Attorney Martin Strahan told a local paper last week that Soliz deserved death. “He was a very dangerous person who would hurt other people if there was ever any chance he might be let loose, which is why we decided to go with the death penalty option,” Strahan said. Fort Worth Detective Danny Paine called Soliz “the most dangerous person he had ever come in contact with during his law enforcement career.”During the trial, Soliz scratched his gang name, “Kilo,” into the defense table and managed to memorize the mailing address of a potential female member of the jury and wrote her a romantic letter that was intercepted according to the Celburne Times Review.