Texas death row inmate Dexter Johnson blames ineffective counsel in bid for reprieve

Dexter Johnson was facing execution in 2019 when a new team of lawyers asked a judge to assess whether Johnson, who is intellectually disabled, hadn’t received sufficiently vigorous legal counsel. His post-conviction lawyer had waited too long to argue that Johnson was exempt from execution due to his disability, they said. An appeals court granted a stay so a judge can determine whether the 33-year-old convicted in a 2006 double murder met the revised diagnostic criteria for a person with diminished capacity. If he did qualify, the state would be violating Johnson’s constitutional rights if it put him to death, his new team contended.

On Thursday, the lawyer accused of missing the mark gave his side of the story in a federal courtroom in Houston. And Johnson’s lawyers argued, in turn, that the initial habeas lawyer had provided inadequate assistance and failed to properly assert that Johnson should be exempt from the death chamber by virtue of his intellectual disability. Johnson was convicted in Harris County of a carjacking that left 23-year-old Maria Aparece and her boyfriend, 17-year-old Huy Ngo, dead in June 2006. Johnson, then 18, and two accomplices threatened Aparece and Ngo with a pistol and a shotgun as they sat in Aparece’s Toyota, then took the couple on a joyride around Houston while two other accomplices followed in a separate car, witnesses said. After Johnson and his crew pulled over, he raped Aparece in the backseat while the others forced Ngo to stay and listen. Then, according to evidence at trial, Johnson shot Ngo in the head and killed Aparece. Johnson has repeatedly maintained that he did not fire the shots that killed the couple. The facts of the case and his conviction were not at stake in this week’s proceedings, but rather his sentence.