Frank Moore was sentenced to death for the January 21, 1994 shooting deaths of Samuel Boyd and Patrick Clark. Moore's first death sentence was set aside by an appeals court, and he was again sentenced to death by a second jury. Moore shot and killed two individuals after an altercation in the parking lot of the Wheels of Joy Club in San Antonio, Texas, around 2:00 a.m. on January 21, 1994. The persons killed were Samuel Boyd, 23-years old, and Patrick Clark, 15-years old. The first peace officer on the scene found Boyd dead or dying in the passenger seat of an automobile and Clark lying dead next to the driver's door. An investigator found shell casings in a location that suggested that the shots were fired from the left rear of the vehicle. This evidence comported with the deputy medical examiner's testimony that the tracks of the bullet wounds were generally from back to front and left to right. Boyd had been wounded by six bullets and Clark by five. Boyd's blood contained 0.28 grams per deciliter of ethanol alcohol. Clark's blood contained 0.15 grams per deciliter of ethanol, as well as 0.25 milligrams per liter of diazepam and 0.33 milligrams per liter of nordiazepam. In the opinion of the medical expert, the latter two controlled substances are muscle relaxants. Both victims were acutely intoxicated at the times of their deaths. The State called Angela Wallace, who lived in Houston and was visiting San Antonio to attend the funeral of her uncle. Prior to the night of the shootings, Wallace did not know anyone involved in the offense. She testified that she and a friend, Lisa, had gone to an icehouse across from the Wheels of Joy Club. Lisa was Boyd's girlfriend. Boyd met Lisa at the icehouse and the two verbally argued. Wallace left her friend and walked to the Wheels of Joy where she spent several hours in the nightclub; Boyd entered the club after Wallace and told her that Lisa had gone home. During the evening, Wallace saw Moore in the club and at one time Moore and Boyd shook hands and the two spoke and laughed. She also saw Clark in the club but did not see him have any contact with the Moore. Wallace testified that she did not see Boyd or Clark acting drunk or argumentative. Throughout the evening, Moore came and spoke to Wallace and flirted with her. At one point, Wallace observed two women with Moore look at her strangely and she momentarily left the club to deposit her jewelry in her car. As the club prepared to close, Moore asked Wallace to save him the last dance and to give him her telephone number. Wallace refused to give Moore her number, but he offered to give his to her. As the club was closing, Moore was interrupted by a man who stopped and whispered to him; the two men then left the club. Wallace identified this other man from photographs as Ivory Sheffield. When the club closed, Wallace left and went to the parking lot. She testified that Moore, Boyd, Clark, and another man "had a confrontation . . . an exchange of words and someone pushed somebody. . . . It just broke up. Just everybody started scattering a little bit." Wallace saw Clark's car come into the parking lot and stop. She stated that the car did not come close to striking the Moore and it did not back up. While Boyd must have at some point gotten into Clark's car, Wallace did not see him do so. Wallace testified that she saw the Moore walk towards the back of Clark's car. Sheffield got a rifle from the trunk of a Cadillac and tossed it to Moore, who started shooting into Clark's car. Moore handed the gun back to Sheffield and left in a Cadillac. Sheffield said, "Who else wants some of this?" and walked around with the gun. Wallace left the crime scene with an individual named Edmond to notify the family of Boyd and Clark. At the second trial, Moore called Robert Mays, Jr. whose testimony contradicted that of Wallace. Mays, a friend of Moore, was at the Wheels of Joy Club on the night of the shootings. Mays did not know the victims but did observe a scuffle outside the club around closing time. Someone yelled they were going to get their stuff (meaning guns) and two or three males ran across the street and got into a white car. Mays also testified they were going to shoot him. They had guns in the car and the white car came across the street into the parking lot at a high rate of speed and tried to run over Mays and others, including Moore, who tried to get out of the way. The car hit some bushes preventing it from striking Mays, and the car backed up and tried to come back at Mays. Mays made a quick getaway and heard shots as he fled the scene.

Darwin Demond Brown's codefendant Michael Wilson, 19, was employed at the QuikTrip convenience store located on North Garnett Road in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Richard Yost also worked. Brown, 18, and three codefendants came into the store during the early morning hours of February 26 and waited for the most opportune time to accost Yost. The QuikTrip surveillance camera captured the events as they unfolded. The video of the events is quite telling. Yost was cleaning the windows on the coolers with all of the defendants surrounding him. As Yost was walking near a passage-way to the back room, all four defendants attacked him and dragged him to the back room. One of the defendants, Billy Alverson, came back out and picked up some items that were knocked from the shelves. He also kept watch for customers. A few moments later, Alverson and 16-year-old Richard Harjo walked out the front door of the store. While they were going out, Yost was yelling and screaming for help, possibly thinking that a customer had entered the store. Alverson and Harjo re-entered the store with Harjo carrying a black aluminum baseball bat. He carried the bat to where Yost had been taken. The surveillance camera picked up the sounds of the bat striking Yost. Circumstantial evidence showed that the baseball bat struck the handcuffs on Yost's wrists which Yost was holding above his head to ward off the blows. As the blows were being struck, Wilson walked from the back room, checked his hands, put on a QuikTrip jacket, got behind the counter and tried to move the safe. While Wilson was behind the counter, several customers came in. Wilson greeted them with a friendly greeting, sold them merchandise, then said "thank you, come again" or "have a nice day." All this time Wilson continued to try and pull the safe from underneath the counter. He took money from the cash drawer and pulled money out of the currency change machine. At some point after this, Wilson left the counter area and the video went blank as the video was taken from the recorder. Brown was never seen exiting the back room between the times Yost was dragged into the room until the video recorder was stopped. The defendants then loaded two safes into Wilson's car using a dolly from QuikTrip. Yost's body was discovered by customer Larry Wiseman at about 6:00 a.m. Yost was laying on the floor in a pool of blood, milk and beer. Yost's ankles were taped together with duct tape. One handcuff was found near Yost's body. The other cuff was missing from the scene. Detectives learned that Wilson was at the store between the hours of 4:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. Wilson failed to show up for work at the scheduled time of 3:00 p.m. on the same day. Officer Allen set up surveillance on Wilson's house, and shortly thereafter he spotted Wilson get into a gray vehicle. The vehicle was stopped. All four defendants were taken into custody. A large number of five dollar bills was recovered from Harjo at the site of the stop. Brown was a passenger in the vehicle occupied by all of the codefendants. At that time Brown was removed from the car, handcuffed and taken to the Tulsa Police Department where he made a statement. Later, at the police station, money was recovered from all of the defendants except Wilson. Officers searched Alverson's residence where they discovered the drop safe, the dolly, QuikTrip glass cleaner, money tubes and the store surveillance videotape. A search was conducted of Wilson's house but nothing of value was discovered. The next day Wilson's mother called Officer Makinson to come to her house. Once there, the detectives found several items of evidence on the front porch, including the baseball bat, a bloody QuikTrip jacket with Yost's name on it, Wilson's Nike jacket matching the one worn in the store video and the other cuff of the set of handcuffs. Billy Don Alverson was executed in January 2011. 

Reginald Perkins was sent to death row for the slaying of his stepmother, Gertie Mae Perkins in Fort Worth on December 4, 2000. Gertie had been married to Perkins's father for 45 years. The 64-year-old woman's body was found in the trunk of her car in a parking garage. A Tarrant County jury took just 30 minutes in 2002 to decide Reginald Perkins should be put to death. Shortly after the jury's verdict was read in court, Perkins proclaimed his innocence in a written letter read by his lawyer. In November 2007, a federal appeals court rejected claims he was mentally retarded and ineligible for the death penalty, that his legal help earlier had been ineffective, that the Texas sentencing statute was unconstitutional and that he was innocent of the murder. In May of 2008, the US Supreme Court refused to review that appeal. Evidence at his trial showed he pawned his stepmother's wedding ring and wrote fraudulent checks from the account of the family trucking business in Fort Worth. When Gertie Perkins showed up missing, police summoned to her home found a carpet removed, a phone cord disconnected and sheets missing from a bed. He became a suspect after detectives learned of his previous convictions in Ohio for rape and attempted rape and that he had been a suspect in two killings in Cleveland in the 1980s. When arrested, he directed his father and police to Gertie's body. Perkins also acknowledged the slaying to a fellow inmate while awaiting trial and said his motive was robbery. At the punishment phase of his trial, jurors heard testimony that he pleaded guilty in 1982 to the 1980 rape and attempted rape of two 12-year-old girls and that he had been implicated in the strangulation of three women. One of them, Terry Thomas, was the mother of the girl he raped. She was strangled and left for her daughter, the rape victim, to find. Perkins had threatened to kill both of them if the girl talked about the attack. Three weeks before Terry's murder, Jenny Morman, 43, was strangled in her apartment, and Perkins is believed to have committed that murder as well. The other was Paula Nelson, the twin sister of a woman he was living with and later married. She was strangled and left in bed with her small son. There was not enough evidence to charge him in Paula's murder. In 1986, he had been paroled from Ohio after receiving a life prison term for the rape conviction. He was returned from parole eight years later but released again in February 2000. His stepmother's murder occurred 10 months later. Perkins had been on death row in Texas for five years when DNA linked him to the 1991 slayings of Hattie Wilson, 79, and her niece Shirley Douglas, 44. Both women were found strangled in their East Fort Worth apartment. Shirley had also been raped in the attack. Perkins knew the women because he had dated Hattie's granddaughter.

On August 17, 1997, Gerardo Garcia died in the El Paso County Jail of a heroin overdose. Dr. Juan Contin, the Chief Medical Examiner of El Paso County, conducted the autopsy. Contin found that Garcia died of "acute narcotism," caused by morphine (a byproduct of heroin) found in his body. The concentration of morphine in Garcia's blood was 523 ng/ml - a level that was three times higher than the average when compared to 76 deaths due to acute narcotism that had been investigated by Contin's office from January 1995 to September 1997. Contin found a single fresh needle mark on one of Garcia's arms but observed no needle track marks. In Contin's opinion, the absence of track marks meant that Garcia was not a heroin addict. A sheriff's detective found a syringe in the section of the jail in which Garcia was confined. At trial, two witnesses testified that the heroin overdose was involuntary - forced upon Garcia by Ortiz because Ortiz believed that Garcia had revealed Ortiz's role in some bank robberies. Mario Hernandez was in the same section of the jail as Garcia when he died. He testified that this particular section was known as the "Texas Syndicate tank" because it was set aside specifically to contain those associated with the Texas Syndicate. Mario was not a member of the Texas Syndicate but was placed in the tank because his cousin was a member. Mario had not known Garcia or Ortiz before meeting them in the Texas Syndicate tank. According to Mario, Ortiz was the "tank boss," meaning he exercised de facto authority over the other inmates in the tank because of his status with the Texas Syndicate. Ortiz controlled what inmates requested from the jail commissary and he dealt with jailers on behalf of the other inmates. When Garcia was brought into the tank, Mario saw Ortiz "freak." Mario overheard a conversation between Ortiz and Garcia in which Ortiz expressed great concern that Garcia had been caught for some bank robberies. Ortiz and Garcia argued about whether Garcia's capture was the result of being "snitched off" by Garcia's girlfriend or Ortiz's wife. Mario also overheard more than ten phone calls made by Ortiz in which Ortiz attempted to sell a trailer to get money to purchase heroin. Ortiz remarked that he wanted to bring heroin into the jail. Ortiz later succeeded in procuring heroin during visiting hours. Mario knew when Ortiz had obtained the heroin because Ortiz and another inmate were high on heroin when they returned from the visitor's booth. As a heroin addict, Mario could recognize when other people were high on the drug. On August 17, Ortiz and several other inmates called Garcia into one of the individual cells within the tank - cell number five. Mario explained that he was seated at a table in the tank's day-room about five feet away from the doorway of that cell and could see inside. He then described seeing the following sequence of events: Garcia was sitting on a bunk bed in cell number five. Ortiz handed another inmate some heroin. This other inmate dissolved the heroin into water and placed it into a syringe. The syringe containing heroin was handed to Ortiz. Ortiz then injected the heroin into Garcia, who did not look like he wanted to be injected. Almost immediately, Garcia began shaking from what appeared to Mario to be "overdosing." Ortiz noticed that Mario and another inmate not involved in the encounter had witnessed the events. Ortiz brought them heroin, and they injected themselves with it. He told them that Garcia had overdosed, that Garcia was stingy with the heroin and did it all, and that they were not to say anything about the incident. On cross-examination, Mario admitted that he did not actually see the heroin exchange hands before it was "cooked." Defense counsel showed Mario a sketch of the floor plan of the tank. This sketch was prepared by a detective several days after the murder. Defense counsel asserted that the sketch showed that Mario was not really seated at the day-room table closest to cell number five but was actually seated at a table further away. However, Mario explained that he did not draw the sketch himself, and that, while he signed it, the sketch was inaccurate in some respects, including placing Ortiz and Garcia in the wrong locations. On redirect, Mario explained that he could not really see the sketch while the detectives were drawing it, and he reiterated that he had an unobstructed view into cell number five from his seat at the day-room table. Finally, Mario testified that a photograph admitted as State's Exhibit 14 fairly and accurately depicted the view he had into cell number five; that photograph shows an unobstructed view into the cell. Hector Hernandez testified that he was not a member of the Syndicate but was a prospect Ortiz was trying to bring into the organization. Hector testified that he was in the Syndicate tank at the time of the incident in question and that Ortiz ran the tank. Hector heard Ortiz say that Garcia had snitched him out and was going to have to die. Initially, Ortiz planned to stab Garcia but later decided to overdose the victim instead, to make it look like a suicide. Ortiz told Hector that some heroin had been obtained through a visit, and Ortiz planned to use three "dimes" of heroin to kill Garcia. Three days before Garcia died, Ortiz said he was going to kill Garcia. Although Hector was not a heroin user, he used heroin the night of the murder because Ortiz told him to. In addition, Ortiz told Hector to lie about the incident by saying the heroin belonged to Garcia. Hector also testified that he was afraid of Ortiz, that he knew both Garcia and Ortiz, and that Garcia was not a heroin user. On cross-examination, Hector testified that Garcia indicated several times that he wanted to commit suicide because of the crimes he committed. Hector also testified that he had a deal with the State to testify but was told to say there was no deal. On redirect, Hector testified that no one told him that he had to testify in exchange for not being arrested. He further testified that he would be killed if he were incarcerated and that he testified earlier to having a deal because he was frightened of Ortiz. Hector also testified that his pending charge was due to an attempt to bring drugs into jail on Ortiz's orders. Louie Carreon, a detective with the El Paso Police Department, testified that Ortiz offered to give information on a bank robbery in exchange for help regarding a parole revocation warrant. Thomas Lott, a special agent for the FBI, testified that an ex-girlfriend of Garcia told the police that she believed that Garcia was involved in some bank robberies, that Garcia and Ortiz had counted money in her living room, and that Garcia had sold a vehicle to Ortiz. Law enforcement agents picked up Garcia, and he was identified by bank tellers in a photo lineup. While Garcia was being detained at the police station, Ortiz was brought near the area in which Garcia was located so that he could observe Garcia with law enforcement agents and be led to believe that Garcia was talking to the police. Special Agent Lott showed Ortiz a document indicating that Ortiz was a witness against Garcia and indicated that Garcia would know this. In reality, however, Garcia never cooperated with the authorities. James Nance, a sergeant with the El Paso County Sheriff's Department, testified as an expert on prison gangs. Nance testified that Ortiz was the highest ranking member of the Texas Syndicate in El Paso that he was aware of. Given his high rank, Ortiz would automatically become a tank boss of any Texas Syndicate section, and he could even be able to order the death of someone in the tank. The defense presented some testimony about Garcia's desire to commit suicide. Yvonne Chavira, a former girlfriend of Garcia, testified that Garcia said he would kill himself if he were placed in jail again. During cross-examination, Chavira admitted that she had previously told lies to the authorities about Garcia. Doctor John Buscemi read a notation in a jail medical record that indicated Garcia felt suicidal at age 15. Alino Hernandez, a detention division commander for the El Paso Sheriff's Department, testified that a 1990 screening form contained a "yes" answer to the question of whether Garcia had ever attempted or seriously considered committing suicide. However, a 1993 form said "no," a January 1994 form had "no" checked but "yes" circled, an August 1994 form had "no" circled accompanied with a question mark, and the latest form, in 1997, simply had "no" checked. Finally, the defense attempted to impeach Hector's testimony through the testimony of his attorney, Donna Snyder. Snyder testified that Hector told her he had a deal with the State to "have a clean record and have a chance at a new life." But he expressed concern because it was his understanding that, if asked about it on the stand, he should testify that there was no deal. On cross-examination, the prosecutor showed Snyder a document filed in the clerk's office. This document stated that Hector would not be arrested and jailed for the drug possession case so long as he was a potential witness against Ortiz. The document also said that Hector was being housed as an out-of-state witness during the pendency of the trial, after which he would be returned to his originating state where his probation would resume. Snyder testified that the document did not seem consistent with what Hector had told her.