...the life of a street gang hoodlum is educational in some ways, but not conducive toa liberal, academic education. It is to be expected that such a boy, with sucha tragic family background, living on the streets, would become a hardened criminal at a young age, perhaps, even a murderer. Such is not the case with Gabriel Gonzalez. He is innocent of the crime he was convicted for. The facts in this case speak for themselves...  

THE  WRONGFULL CONVICTION OF GABRIEL GONZALEZ                                                                                                                                                       
                                                                                                 By John Albert      

Gabriel was born in New York on March 22, 1974. His Puerto Rican mother was then 23 years old and his Cuban father was 21. His father was epileptic and could not handle a steady job. He lived on a small disability income from social security. His mother worked irregularly at medial cleaning jobs, so the family was always extremely poor. His parents decided that they were not comfortable with the fast-paced, dangerous New York life style, so when Gabriel was about five years old, the family moved to Grand Prairie, Texas. His maternal grandmother, his aunt Millie, and her husband all lived in Grand Prairie. When Gabriel was nine years old, his family, his aunt, and her husband relocated to San Antonio, Texas.
Gabriel’s father was a violent, brutal, mentally-ill man and the family all lived in great fear of him. He was temperamental, violently abusive and had been physically beating and sexually molesting both his wife, his two sons Gabriel and Gregory, and their older sister Damaris, for many years. Due to his father’s epilepsy, his mother always drove the car. One Sunday, as the family returned from church services, his mother announced to his father that she wanted a divorce and wanted him to leave. He slapped her and attacked her therein the car and tried to take the car keys away from her. Both Gabriel and his sister fought with their father in defense of their mother. Gabriel was only 12 years old at the time, but he had built up a great deal of anger toward hisf ather. Although his father was a big, powerful man, and Gabriel was getting the worst of the fight, he kept hitting his father with a fierce violence. The fight ended when his mother pulled Gabriel away from his father as his father succumbed to a grand epileptic seizure there on the sidewalk in front of their apartment. The police had come because his sister had run next door to her aunt’s and called them. When his father awoke from his seizure the police forced him to leave.
Gabriel, his mother, sister, and younger brother, immediately packed their belongings, got in the car and drove to Grand Prairie. It was a very happy trip for the children because they were so relieved by having got rid of their father. A year later they returned to San Antonio so that his mother could be close to her sister, Millie.
In addition to his antagonistic relationship with his father, Gabriel did not have a good relationship with his mother either. He resented her unwillingness to protect him and his siblings from their father. Besides that, she had never been affectionate towards him, there was no emotional bond or communication between them and he did not feel any genuine maternal love from her. He felt abused, unloved, neglected and rejected by everyone in his family, except for his sister, Damaris and his cousin Bekie. They were his sole defenders and confidante.
In San Antonio his mother became friendly with another man who soon becameGabriel’s step-father. He was a truck driver and a drug dealer who transported cocaine in his truck. He was also a highly domineering and controlling man and mistreated Gabriel and his siblings. There were frequent fist fights between them.So Gabriel left home several times at 13 and 14. By the age of 15 years, he left home for good and dropped out of school. He has had very little contact with any of his family since then and no support from his family. He had joined a street gang at 14 and so he grew-up on the streets of the San Antonio ghetto for the next five years. Street gangs are not actually criminal organizations and are not formed for the purpose of committing crimes. Instead, they develop as family-like substitutes for ghetto children who feel rejected at home. The camaraderie, friendships and brotherly affection is a strong bond that replaces the lost family attachment for these young boys. Juvenile street boys who are attracted to join gangs are at the age of early puberty, when their sense of manhood is just beginning to develop, so the ritual trappings of street gang indoctrination and membership are sometimes harsh and brutal, but that is not due to criminal intent. They are merely children trying to make their way in a hostile world on their own. The criminal influences from their ghetto environment encourage them to turn to petty crime, gambling, drinking and drugs at an early age. It is a part of the normal maturation process for ghetto children.  

When Gabriel Gonzalez was 20 years old, he was having an affair with a girl named Carolina, and while visiting with her on July 18, 1994, he vaguely overheard some boys planning a robbery. He met with Carolina at her cousin,Shawntee Simmons house, where he saw DeAnthony Walker, Haywood Grant and some other boys talking and plotting together in the living room as he passed through. He knew Walker, although not well, they were not friends, but Grant and the others he did not know at all. He and Carolina went into a bedroom to spend the evening together while Walker, Grant and their friends discussed their plans in the other room. At one point he went back into the living room to get a package of diapers for Carolina so she could change her baby daughter before putting her to bed. He vaguely heard enough to know that they were planning a robbery, and he could hear them talking through the drape over the bedroom doorway, but he was preoccupied with Carolina and paid no attention to their conversation.The following day, July 19, 1994, Gabriel spent the day with another girlfriend, Susie, and he started drinking early. He was already high when DeAnthony Walker and four of his friends came over to the apartment that evening. They had brought some 40 ounce bottles of malt liquor along with themand everyone was drinking and smoking pot. That was a surprise for Gabriel since he barely knew Walker and he did not know the others at all except for having seen them at Simmon’s house the day before. Gabriel had been drinking all day before they came and so he became quite drunk in a short time, he was soon slurring his speech and staggering around. At about midnight, Gabriel’s friend, Roderick Whitehead, came over and spoke with Gabriel for a while, but Gabriel was too drunk to carry on a conversation so after a short time Roderick left. Shortly after 2 AM, theother four guys persuaded Gabriel to go with them to get something to eat.Gabriel was reluctant to go with them; he was too drunk and tired, but they helped him to the car since he could not walk to well on his own. When the four boys returned to the apartment between 3 and 4 AM,Gabriel was not with them. They told Susie that he was passed-out in the car.She went out to the car and found him in a deep, stuporous sleep. She tried to wake him to bring him inside, but he could not be woken, so she left him there,and went to sleep by herself in the apartment. Gabriel was still asleep in the car when the four boys left the apartment, drove to a pawnshop to rob it and shot the owner. Gabriel was not aware of what transpired while he slept in the back seat of the car until he was told about it afterward.  

One day later Gabriel was arrested for a probation violation. Just two days after that, he was charged with the murder of the pawn shop owner.  

The life of a street gang hoodlum is educational in some ways, but not conducive to a liberal, academic education. It is to be expected that such a boy, with such a tragic family background, living on the streets, would become a hardened criminal at a young age, perhaps, even a murderer. Such is not the case with Gabriel Gonzalez. He is innocent of the crime he was convicted for.The facts in this case speak for themselves. It is not unusual to overhear people making plans to commit a crime in the ghetto. When one lives in a high crime neighborhood, one hears discussions of crimes all the time. It is a common, almost everyday occurrence. Since these people were not comrades of Gabriel’s, he would never have become involved in their plans. They would not trust him and he would not trust them. One does not trust strangers that well.Besides, he was not a part of the conversation and only had the vaguest impression of what they were discussing. Haywood Grant, however, testified at the trial that Gabriel was a part of the group planning that robbery. He gave conflicting and contradictory testimony against Gabriel and the others in the different trials. But in fact, Grant had been deeply involved in the planning himself; he was supposed to receive two guns from the pawnshop robbery inr eturn for his part in it. At that time, Grant had charges pending against him for unrelated crimes of burglary, auto theft and trespass. He was exposed to being sentenced for up to 99 years, so he benefited by having all of those charges dropped in return for turning state’s evidence against Gabriel and the others. As a plotter in the pawnshop robbery he was also subject to a death sentence under the “law of parties”. He had adequate motive to lie in order to shield himself. As well as that, one of the robbers, DeAnthony Walker, named Gabriel as the shooter, and he was convicted on that, and on Grant’s testimony implicating him in the plot.There was also a witness who was parked across the street from the pawnshop and saw the car with the robbers drive away. He claimed 18 days later after seeing Gabriel all over the local news and pressure from the police through an extremely suggestive photo line-up to have recognized Gabriel as the driver, but Gabriel was asleep lying down in the back seat throughout the robbery, the murder, and the getaway. Based upon the conditionhe was in on the night of the 19th and the next morning, he could not have participated in a robbery or a murder.

Gabriel’s attorney filed a habeas corpus petition on his behalf in the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in 1999.The Court of Criminal Appeals remanded back to the trail court for an evidentiary hearing, which was held in September 1999, regarding the conflicting, inconsistent statements by two witnesses which had been withheld from the defense at trial, as well as mitigation circumstances that had been failed to be investigated by Gabriel’s trail attorneys. After the lower court viewed those inconsistent statements, the court decided that they were not exculpatory in a Findings of Facts and Conclusions of Law, and refused to grant a new trial that was submitted to the Court of Criminal Appeals for their opinion. After pending in the court of criminal appeals for over 6 years,the court (in an attempt to conceal the prosecutors illegal activity to wrongfully convict Gabriel) refused to grant Gabriel a new trail (where the prosecutorial corruption would be exposed) and only granted Gabriel a resentencing hearing due to mitigating circumstances Gabriel’s trail attorneys failed to investigate.If the court followed its own law, they are obligated by law to grant Gabriel the new trail he deserves. It is extremely uncommon for the court to withhold a decision for such a long time as six years, and the court does not explain itself, but they are under no legal requirement to finalize their decision in a timely manner.
There is no legal method of reminding the court ofits unconscionable delay. A new trial would very likely exonerate Gabriel because there is no evidence placing him at the scene of the crime, no weapon was found, he was not found tohave any of the spoils of the robbery, and with Walker and McHenry’s testimony discredited, and that leaves only two items of evidence to deal with. Haywood Grant‘s testimony that he overheard Gabriel participating in planning the robbery is untrue and self-serving, but he did not witness the crime. The evidence is that Grant, himself, participated in the planning, not Gabriel Gonzalez. The eyewitness from across the street could not have seen Gabriel driving the car as he claimed, but he did not witness the crime either.
There is no valid evidence to convict Gabriel Gonzalez of this crime. Prosecutors always base their decision to prosecute a case on one single consideration.That is whether they believe they can persuade the jury to convict or not. The issue of actual guilt or innocence is never a consideration. If they do notbelieve they can win a conviction, they will not take the case to trial. It is very likely that in this case they will decide to forgo a second trial, but we cannot count on that. We must organize in order to pressure the courts to give Gabriel his justice due and must help Gabriel raise the necessary funds to have adequate

legal representation through this entire legal nightmare! Please donate whatever you can, even if it’s just a dollar – it all counts and helps!

Gabriel has three children and a wife whom he is devoted to. Two girls and one boy. He has a profound love and feeling for children and he is strongly committed to devote himself to helping youths get through the teenage years and become responsible citizenswith a bright future. He is involved in launching a newsletter written for teenage consumption to reach out to juveniles who face the same problems that he went through. Part of his self-improvement can be attributed to the influence of coming to live in prison on death row at the age of 20. It is alonely, unhappy, solitary life, but can lead to an enriching introspection forthe more intellectually curious minds like Gabriel’s. As unpleasant and difficult as it is, Gabriel has taken advantage of the few positive aspects of prison life and developed a broad understanding of himself and his world grounded in an acceptance of reality. He has managed on his own, without any professional psychological guidance, to analyze, comprehend, and deal with his past life and put it all behind him. He looks forward to leading a wholesome,rewarding life when he is finally exonerated and released.  

Consider the following excerpt from Gabriel’s writings, reproduced here to give the reader some insight into his character:
"Murder, that seems to be the centerpiece that my life revolves around. Texas’ Death Row is my current place of confinement. I’m imprisoned in a 6 by 9 corner of this slaughter house,forced to witness the torturous prelude to the execution of the people around me. I’m here, sentenced to die, but that isn’t as simplistic as it may sound.The thought of death, the constant flow of death, living alone in this monotonous lifestyle of Death Row, combines to make a daily dose of lethal,mental and emotional deterioration."
 "I am dying in here, in part everyday. But actually, I am faring well by comparison with some of the other men here. Maybe it’s because I’m still young and considerably stubborn minded. Maybe it's the fear that runs through me when I witness men slowly slip into different stages of dementia. I can honestly say that I do not fear dying, but Ido fear losing all sense of myself as a human being before dying. When a man mops his cell down with feces or urinates on the floor, as if to mark his territory like an animal, his human self is no longer intact. He is no longer apart of society, not even of prison society. He is merely subsisting on the peripheral edge of everyone else’s consciousness. In other words, no one gives a damn about him. It is the indiscriminate rapidity with which this craziness strikes that I fear the most."
"The atmosphere of the building that Death Row prisoners are housed in is seemingly designed to drive us out of our minds. It is as if the prison administrators are deliberately driving men insane so that they match the sensationalized image of a Death Row murderer that they represent in the administrator’s minds. Perhaps they believe that it is easier to kill a man thought to be crazy, over one who is still coherent and desperate to remain alive. I do not know, but that appears to be the theme here."
"There are no television, no craft programs; there are no work programs,nothing to occupy one’s mind, and prisoners are locked in their cells 23 hours out of every day. From the moment they come here, until the day their remains are wheeled out, visitation, mail, showers, and one hour of single-man recreation are the only variations. Recreation consists of one hour alone, in a cage slightly larger than the one we are forced to live in. Every day living here is a constant struggle to maintain the desire to live. Many men are finally eager to go down to the executioner. Their constitution has been murdered.Their strength has been murdered. Their desire for life has been murdered. What is there left, to sustain life? That is a question I hope that I never have to ask myself."

"For now, I know that I have much to live for, but sometimes, the constant killing of men around me makes all that I have left in life seem mediocre compared to all that I have to live with."