Condemned killer David Martinez insists he's not giving up but just wants to move on with the death sentence a San Antonio jury gave him.
"They convicted me," Martinez, 36, said recently from a tiny visiting cage outside death row as his Wednesday evening execution approached. "That's the end of it."
Martinez would be the sixth inmate executed already this year in the nation's most active death penalty state. Two more are scheduled for lethal injection in Huntsville next week.
Martinez has been on death row outside Livingston since he was convicted more than 13 years ago of using a baseball bat to fatally beat his live-in girlfriend and her teenage son at the woman's San Antonio home.
A federal appeals court nearly a year ago turned down an appeal of his conviction. Last summer, a federal judge ruled he was competent to waive his appeals, as he requested. No new court actions have been filed and none was expected.
"I'm not asking for clemency, I'm not asking for squat," he said. "February 4, that's it. I'm not going to appeal nothing."
Martinez was on parole after serving five months of a five-year sentence for attempted sexual assault when he was arrested for the 1994 slayings of Carolina Prado, 37, and her son, Erik, 14. At the time of his arrest at his grandmother's home in San Marcos, where he fled after the killings, he'd also been sought for nine months as a parole violator for refusing to report his parole officer.
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Prado's younger daughter, who was 10 at the time of the slayings, testified against Martinez, telling a Bexar County jury she saw him bash her brother's head.
The girl, awakened by the sound of the bat, was told to be quiet or she would get the same treatment. She was tied up, then freed herself after Martinez left the house and walked to her grandmother's house nearby. The woman found her grandson's body, then called police who discovered Prado's body.
Martinez told officers who arrested him that he "killed them just like cockroaches." In a statement to police, he said the slayings occurred after he drank a 12-pack of beer and a large bottle of rum. He later testified at his trial, however, that police coerced him into making a confession and denied any role in their deaths.
Asked if he was innocent or guilty, Martinez told The Associated Press from prison: "Neither. My peers said I was guilty. It's not about innocence or guilt. It doesn't matter. It is what it is.
"Go with it," he said of the punishment. "It doesn't bother me."
Martinez, known as "Snoopy" and "Bam Bam," had a lengthy juvenile criminal history in the Rio Grande Valley that began at age 13 when authorities said he broke into a neighbor's house and stole her panties. When he was 16 in 1988, he received juvenile probation for six burglaries and eventually was placed in custody of the Texas Youth Commission. Three years later, he pleaded guilty to attempted sexual assault for an attack on a McAllen shoe store manager.
"It all starts with that," Martinez said, denying the attack. "None of that happened."
He received a probated sentence, then went to prison for probation violations. He was released on parole and was sought as a parole violator when he was arrested for the double slaying in San Antonio.
"It was the most heinous crime I ever prosecuted," A.J. Dimaline, who spent nearly eight years as a Bexar County assistant district attorney and prosecuted Martinez, said last week. "He had no redeeming qualities. Even during the trial, he threatened his lawyers and my partner. During the trial, the judge had to handcuff him to his chair during jury selection."
Dimaline said it appeared Prado had decided to boot him out of her house and he responded with the attack.
"He got beered up that night and for whatever reason decided to take them out," he said.
Martinez, from prison, blamed his behavior on arrogance.
"This is what I need," he said of the execution. "This is what I want."
Next week, Dale Scheanette, 35, is set to die Tuesday for the Christmas Eve 1996 rape-slaying of Wendie Prescott, 22, a teacher's aide, at her apartment in Arlington. Two days later, Johnny Ray Johnson, 51, faced lethal injection for the 1995 rape-slaying of a Houston woman, Leah Joette Beane, 41.
Condemned killer David Martinez insists he's not giving up but just wants to move on with the death sentence a San Antonio jury gave him.
