BEXAR COUNTY, Texas – The prison sentence for a San Antonio convicted in a 2015 murder will remain in place, according to a unanimous Wednesday ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court.
In June 2018, David Asa Villarreal was convicted and sentenced to 60 years in prison following the 2015 stabbing death of his boyfriend, Aaron Estrada, 29.
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Estrada was killed on Oct. 16, 2015, at his apartment in the 12000 block of West Avenue.
Villarreal’s defense team claimed their client stabbed Estrada in self-defense while Estrada choked him in a “drug-fueled battle for his life.”
Villarreal, who was 32 at the time of his sentencing, later took the stand as the defense’s lone witness. His testimony was eventually interrupted by a recess that ended court proceedings for the day.
Before the recess, Jefferson Moore, the presiding judge over the trial and Bexar County’s 186th Criminal District Court at the time, reminded Villarreal and his defense team that they were allowed to talk during the recess, a requirement provided by the Sixth Amendment.
“I’m not telling you you can’t talk to them,” Moore told Villarreal.
Among other rights, the Sixth Amendment grants defendants the right to confer with their attorneys. However, Moore added the caveat of barring Villarreal and the defense from discussing his remaining testimony during the recess period.
“[A]sk yourselves before you talk to [Villarreal] about something, is this something that—manage[s] his testimony in front of the jury?” Moore told Villarreal’s attorneys, according to the Supreme Court’s opinion.
While the defense team initially objected to Moore’s order under the Sixth Amendment, they “understood the order’s scope” and did not “suggest that the qualified conferral order had inhibited any conversation they wished to have,” the opinion stated.
Villarreal, who is now 39, resumed testimony the following day and was later sentenced on June 25, 2018.
After sentencing, Villarreal and his defense team appealed the sentence and filed a lawsuit: David Villarreal v. The State of Texas.
Following rulings in favor of the state by the Fourth Court of Appeals and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA), a Bexar County District Attorney’s Office news release revealed the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case before it made its own ruling Wednesday.
“The conferral order (by Moore) did not ban or impermissibly chill constitutionally protected consultation,” Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her opinion. “The judgment of the TCCA is affirmed.”
Fellow Associate Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch also penned their own concurring opinions in the ruling.
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