Argentina Backs Texas Death Row Prisoner at U.S. Supreme Court

Racism, mental health issues, and years of convoluted litigation are nothing new for a U.S. death penalty case, but Victor Saldaño’s has something extra: a foreign government fighting for his life.

Argentina has for decades backed its citizen, who faces execution in Texas following “a generation of legal gymnastics,” as one of his lawyers put it.

Saldaño’s latest appeal is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, and he hopes the weight of a country behind him helps win the justices over.

“It’s this amazing situation where a foreign government, looking after the interests of one of its citizens, brought a major human rights issue to light in the U.S.,” said Jonathan Miller, a U.S. lawyer and law professor who’s worked for the Argentine government on the case since the 1990s.

Saldaño already got his first death sentence thrown out based on racist testimony against him. But he’s challenging his latest one because it stemmed from his mental deterioration on death row, which he was only on because of the initial racist testimony, he says.

It’s a “very important case for Argentina,” said Gabriela Quinteros of its foreign ministry, noting it’s “the only case of an Argentine being condemned to death and being on death row for so many years, more than twenty years.”

The justices could decide in the coming weeks to add Saldaño’s appeal to its docket this term.

Legal Gymnastics

Paul King, a “very passive” man in his late forties, was walking into a Sack n’ Save grocery store in Plano, Texas, in November 1995.

He was going to get food for a Thanksgiving lunch for his fellow Best Buy employees, when Saldaño and another man, Jorge Chavez, took him at gunpoint and drove to a nearby lake, Texas officials recounted in their brief opposing Saldaño’s high court petition. Saldaño shot King five times, took his watch and wallet, and left him for dead.

A Texas jury sentenced Saldaño to death in 1996.

The “legal gymnastics” that followed included getting that sentence overturned, only for Saldaño to be sentenced to death again a decade later.

To return death sentences, Texas juries need to find future dangerousness—that is, a likelihood that defendants “would commit future criminal acts of violence that would constitute a continuing threat to society.”

In the first trial, an expert testified that Saldaño was more likely to pose such a danger because he’s Hispanic.

That’s similar to the 2017 Supreme Court case of Duane Buck, another Texas death row case where an expert said the defendant would be more dangerous because of his race—black, in Buck’s case. Buck won his high court case, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the majority that the law “punishes people for what they do, not who they are.”

It’s actually the same expert in both cases: Walter Quijano, former chief psychologist for the Texas prison system. Quijano’s racist testimony in a series of cases came to widespread attention due to the Argentine government’s involvement in Saldaño’s case, according to Miller, a professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles.

“The only reason any of the episodes involving Quijano came to light was because there was a legislator from the province of Córdoba and consular officials who were following the first trial, and they were outraged by what happened,” he said, referring to Saldaño’s home province in Argentina. “They pushed the state-appointed defense counsel to appeal this specific issue of Quijano’s testimony.” Argentina doesn’t have capital punishment.

The U.S. Supreme Court sent Saldaño’s case back to Texas in 2000, after the state’s attorney general at the time, John Cornyn—now one of its U.S. senators—confessed error due to the race issue.

But to make matters even more complicated, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals—the state’s top court for criminal cases—rebuffed Cornyn, siding instead with the DA’s office that prosecuted Saldaño.

He eventually got a new sentencing trial, in 2004.

But by then, years on death row—"much of it in an isolated nine by six foot cell with virtually no opportunity for human contact"—left him “severely mentally ill,” unable to present himself to a jury “without seeming a monster,” Saldaño says in his petition, filed by Thomas Scott Smith of Sherman, Texas.

The state wouldn’t comment on the case beyond its legal filings, citing the ongoing litigation.

Dangerousness, Decline

Saldaño’s real decline began when he moved to the Polunsky Unit in early 2000, he says of what he calls “perhaps the most severe death row in the country judged by the isolation it imposes on its inmates.” He attempted suicide in 2001.

“The Argentine Consulate in Houston’s monthly visits provided Mr. Saldaño with his primary link to the outside world after his 1996 death sentence,” Miller writes in the brief he filed on Argentina’s behalf. The Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, and Mexico also signed on. “Unfortunately, that meant the Consulate also witnessed Mr. Saldaño’s severe mental decline across those many visits.”

At his 2004 resentencing trial, “virtually all” of the future dangerousness testimony related to how difficult Saldaño was on death row, he says, citing testimony from death row prison guards about his “going naked, visibly masturbating, and throwing urine and feces.”

“It becomes extraordinarily difficult for a jury to evaluate and predict an individual’s future propensity for violence when he has mentally decompensated after years of isolation,” Saldaño says in his petition, which argues that Texas’ future dangerousness requirement is too vague in his situation.

Texas officials say Saldaño’s appeal tries to forge new ground, observing in their opposition brief that “every Texas court and every federal court to address the issue has unequivocally held that the Texas future-dangerousness issue is not vague.”

They also point to factors predating Saldaño’s death row stint as warranting concern—like his “laughing like crazy” after he shot King, and saying he killed him because “you see all these rich people driving expensive cars or vehicles, and living in expensive homes ... it just makes you want to take it from ‘em.”

The case is Saldaño v. Davis, U.S., 19-5171.