TMS Fights for Justice for Both Mother and Unborn Child in Texas Homicide Case
Posted by Thomas More Society (June 23, 2010 at 11:25 pm)
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has cited the amicus (”friend of the court”) brief authored by Thomas More Society Special Counsel Paul Linton in its lengthy opinion on the appeal of capital defendant Adrian Estrada, who had been found guilty for murdering both 17-year old Stephanie Sanchez and her thirteen-week old unborn child. Linton filed the amicus brief on behalf of the Texas Alliance for Life and is cited on page 54-55 in footnote 40.
While Estrada’s lawyers won a reversal and remand for a new punishment hearing, his constitutional challenge to the Texas statute that makes it a capital offense to intentionally or knowingly murder an unborn child—a statute that was also drafted by special counsel Paul Linton—was roundly rejected.
Tom Brejcha, president and chief counsel of Thomas More Society, said, “We are pleased to have helped the Texas Alliance for Life and the people of Texas in this latest successful defense of fetal homicide laws. Cases like this one are a major step toward getting society to recognize that all unborn children deserve the full protection of law, not just those ‘wanted’ by their mothers.”
Estrada was a youth pastor at a San Antonio church, and the late Ms. Sanchez, who lived at home with her parents and three younger siblings, had been in his youth group. Estrada began a sexual relationship with Ms. Sanchez when she was only sixteen years old, and she became pregnant three times.
The first time she had an abortion, and the next time she miscarried. But upon becoming pregnant a third time, young Stephanie decided to have the baby. While Estrada told Sanchez that he wanted to share his life with her and her baby, he didn’t tell her that he was also sexually involved with another underage girl in the youth group.
Estrada, then 22, went to Sanchez’s home when she was 13 weeks pregnant, choked her, and stabbed her 13 times in her back and in the back of her head and neck, leaving her bloody body on the kitchen floor where he knew her father and siblings would soon return home to find her. An autopsy revealed that there was nothing “wrong with [the unborn] child that would cause death except the fact that the mother was dead.”
Among several other contentions on appeal, Estrada’s lawyers argued that Texas’ “fetal homicide statute” was unconstitutional, charging that its definition of “individual” to include “an unborn child at every stage of gestation from fertilization until birth” violated the Roe v. Wade-based federal constitutional law on abortion rights, as “fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses” could not be defined as “persons,” and the statute was too vague.
But the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals Justices rejected all these claims, as the fetal homicide statute, as drafted by Paul Linton, “exempt[ed] the conduct of the mother pursuant to the principles in Roe v. Wade,” thereby averting any clash with federal abortion rights. The Justices concluded: “By expressly defining capital murder such that one of the victims may be any unborn child from fertilization throughout all stages of gestation, the statute leaves no ambiguity as to what conduct is proscribed.”
The opinion of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals may be found here, and Thomas More Society’s friend of the court brief may be found here.