![]() ![]() Specifically, he requested that Pastor Dana Moore of Corpus Christi’s Second Baptist Church, whom Ramirez had met through the pastor’s prison ministry in 2017, be permitted to be in the room with him at the time of his death. But Ramirez sued in August of that year, arguing that the state’s ban on clergy other than staff chaplains employed by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in the execution chamber violated his religious rights. ![]() Once that litigation was exhausted, Texas set a new execution date for Ramirez, in September 2020. “I just want to ask them to know that I'm sorry”-and passed, thanks to a stay from a federal district court. Ramirez reconsidered his desire to end what he had described as his “trash life.” His appeals continued until 2017, when his first execution date arrived-“I wouldn’t want to ask them to forgive me,” Ramirez said of Castro’s family at the time. “God ain’t gonna save me.”īut before Ramirez could appear for a hearing in Galvan’s court, he learned of a paternal half sister with whom he struck up a relationship, as though the Lord in all his vengeance couldn’t resist such a nakedly desperate plea for love. “I found God a long time ago but I’m not gonna turn holy roller since I ruined my life,” he told the psychologist. ![]() He wrote a letter to Judge Bobby Galvan of Texas’s Ninety-Fourth District Court insisting that his remaining legal efforts be suspended so that “justice will be served for the family and friends of Pablo Castro in a speedy fashion … they’ve waited long enough!” In conversations with a prison psychologist, Ramirez said that he would have been willing to carry on with his appeals if he had “support,” or “ to show me you care,” but that he had neither and, despite his faith in God, he didn’t expect any. In 2011, news reports show, Ramirez briefly considered waiving his appeals and hastening his execution. He would be forced, in other words, to face his sins for honest reasons or to evade them until the bitter end-a dilemma in which few of us would demonstrate much moral courage, and one we spend most of our lives suspending in any case. If redemption were available to a man so soundly convicted of his crime, it would have to occur within the confines of his remaining days and without the promise of much ameliorative effect upon his conditions. ![]() What he had done had permanently altered a number of lives, his included, and the nature of his sentence painted the balance of his years in shades of guilt and shame. In the years that followed, Ramirez’s sin was indeed ever before him, recapitulated in court papers and media flares when his legal appeals, at times, succeeded. At his 2008 trial, for instance, after his own father took the stand in his defense, Ramirez asked that his attorneys withdraw all additional mitigation witnesses, further requesting that they read the jury the following verse from Psalm 51:3: “For I acknowledge my transgressions and my sin is ever before me.” The jury sentenced him to death unanimously. The state sought the death penalty in Ramirez’s case, and thus began a years-long process of Ramirez countering Texas’s efforts to end his life while expressing serious doubts as to whether he deserved to live at all. His two female accomplices, who had assisted Ramirez in two other double robberies the same evening Ramirez murdered Castro, were each arrested the night of the killing and sentenced to lengthy prison terms for their roles in the crime spree. His killer was John Henry Ramirez, a 20-year-old ex-Marine who had begun using drugs at 12 and was, by the time he happened to spot Castro taking out the garbage that night, at the tail end of a multiday alcohol, Xanax, and cocaine binge that he was fighting desperately to prolong.Īfter he murdered Castro, Ramirez fled to Mexico, where he evaded the law for a few years until agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation captured him near Brownsville, Texas, along the U.S. P ablo Castro, father of nine and convenience-store worker of 14 years in Corpus Christi, Texas, was beaten and stabbed to death for $1.25 on the night of July 14, 2004. ![]()
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