Fort Worth man on death row since 2001 thinks DA’s Office should be removed from case
A Fort Worth man who’s been on death row for almost two decades in connection with the fatal beatings of his elderly great-aunt and two young men is hoping the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office will be removed from the case over two alleged conflicts of interest, court documents show.
The motion filed on Monday is part of a long ongoing legal battle holding up his death by lethal injection, which doesn’t have a set date but the county intends to carry out.
Quintin Phillippe Jones was 20 years old when he was arrested on Sept. 11, 1999, the day a neighbor of his 83-year-old great aunt, Berthena Bryant, found the woman beaten to death in her home, according to Star-Telegram archives. He told investigators had been using heroin and cocaine the night before, and in the early morning realized he was out of drugs and money. He went to Bryant’s house between 5 and 5:30 a.m. looking for money, he confessed, before he found a baseball bat she had kept for protection. He beat her to death with it and took $30.
Prosecutors contended one day earlier Jones, who suffered from multiple personality disorder, had called Bryant in need of cash, turning to a family member who had helped him out before. Bryant told him no.
Later in September of 1999, investigators in Wise County tied Jones and his friend Ricky Carl “Red” Roosa, then 40, to the June 1999 deaths of Clark Peoples, 27, and Marc Sanders, 19, according to the Star-Telegram archives. They determined Jones and Roosa had lured the two men to Jones’ home, where they beat them to death and took what they had on them, including their tennis shoes. Roosa and Jones, investigators said, then covered their bodies in sheets, loaded them into the car the victims arrived in and took them to the Trinity River, where they dumped them.
Roosa and Jones were convicted in 2001 on two counts of capital murder, though Roosa received a sentence of life in prison. Since then, Jones’ death sentence has been stalled in the courts amid competing legal motions, and there has recently been more activity.
On Oct. 12, the DA’s Office asked the court to enter an order setting an execution date, according to a motion filed on Monday on behalf of Jones. The criminal district attorney listed in the case is Sharen Wilson, the documents state, while Larry Moore is serving as the head of the criminal division that includes the post-conviction unit.
Jones’ attorney, Michael Mowla, argued in the motion there are two conflicts of interest since Wilson was the presiding judge in his client’s capital murder case, imposing the death sentence in March of 2001, and Moore served as the defense counsel for Jones.
“The appearance of impropriety is pronounced and far outweighs the interests of the DA’s Office to remain the prosecutor,” Mowla wrote in the documents. “The entire DA’s Office must be disqualified.”
Mowla is asking the court to grant the motion to disqualify, which would remove the DA’s Office as the prosecuting agency in this case, the documents show. He is also asking the court to strike the Oct. 12 DA’s Office motion to enter an order setting an execution date.
The DA’s Office refuted the defense’s motion in a statement sent to the Star-Telegram, saying “the law is clear” regarding conflicts of interest. A criminal district attorney isn’t disqualified from a case in which he or she previously served as a trial court judge, the DA’s Office said in the the statement, just as the DA’s Office as a whole isn’t disqualified because one employee formerly represented a defendant in the same case.
“The only limitation is the individual attorney who previously represented the defendant not participate or be consulted in any way about the case,” the DA’s Office said.
Mowla didn’t want to provide a comment for this story. But Kristin Houle Cuellar, the director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, spoke on his behalf — not so much on the specific details of his case but of their shared opposition to this sentence of death being carried out in Tarrant County.
Tarrant County, Houle Cuellar said, has continued to push for the death penalty in certain cases as other counties have moved away from it. Over the last five years, Tarrant has been among four counties to impose more than one death sentence, according to a report from the coalition. The county performed one execution by lethal injection in 2019, in the case of Billy Jack Crutsinger, convicted of fatally stabbing an 89-year-old mother and her daughter.
In August, a mistrial was declared in the death penalty case against James Earnest Floyd, who’s suspected of beating and then fatally shooting a 69-year-old man during a home invasion robbery in 2017. The trial had already been delayed several times due to COVID-19.
There are two executions scheduled in Tarrant County for 2021, one for Feb. 2 and one for June 30, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. That makes Tarrant the the only county with more than one execution scheduled.
“Obviously they’re seeking it here in a third case,” Houle Cuellar said. “It’s really, again, an outlier, even among the other counties that have historically used the death penalty most often.”
Houle Cuellar, after speaking with Mowla, noted in an email on Thursday that while Jones has never professed his innocence in this case, he was 20 at the time while Roosa was 40. The evidence presented at trial, she said, also painted Roosa as the leader.
Moore, now an assistant criminal district attorney in Tarrant County, and another defense attorney argued during the trial that a life of horrific abuse had contributed to Jones killing three people. He was neglected by his parents through his childhood, they said, and repeatedly sexually abused by his stepbrother and then his brother. By age 12, he was using drugs, they said.
He developed an additional personality, “James,” they said. The condition has been confirmed by a psychiatrist who evaluated Jones for the DA’s Office, court records show, even though the doctor determined he was competent enough to stand trial.
The gruesome crime scene photos from the murders showed Jones wasn’t well, Moore argued in February 2001.
“You know just by looking at those photographs that Quintin isn’t like you and I,” Moore said, according to the Star-Telegram archives. “Think of all the pain that Quintin’s been through.”
This story was originally published November 12, 2020 at 4:23 PM.
