Mayer Brown LLP partner Charles Kelley was on a plane gathering his bags at the end of a business flight when he received the news that Texas' highest criminal court had commuted to life the death sentence of an intellectually challenged man the firm has represented for decades.

Kelley said he felt "euphoric" as he pulled luggage from an overhead bin.

"The first thing I thought about was how rewarding it would be to tell his family," Kelley said, referring to Larry Estrada, who was 19 when he was sentenced to death in 1998 for his role in the robbery of a Houston-area convenience store that left one clerk dead and another wounded.

After hearing of the Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas ruling in April, Kelley — a commercial litigator who has practiced with Mayer Brown for over three decades — called Kyle Friesen, another lawyer who worked on the case for years and who, Kelley said, "lived this case with Larry."

"I said, 'Kyle, you really deserve to be the one to tell this to the family,'" Kelley said. "I think for [Estrada's family] to see 20-plus years of commitment from us to get here, I think that gave them hope. And now we've gotten this relief."

Kelley said Estrada's cognitive limitations make it difficult for him to understand what the court's ruling means — but that knowing he will no longer be housed in a one-man cell with only an hour of recreation per day is something Estrada will grasp.

"I'm convinced this is a better situation for him and his family," Kelley said. "He may soon get to hug his mother for the first time in over 20 years. There is a feeling of justice, a sense of feeling we did something that matters."

Friesen is an intellectual property litigator who recently joined Heim Payne & Chorush LLP as senior counsel. Before his recent move, Friesen practiced for more than seven years with Shook Hardy & Bacon LLP, and when he made a move there from Mayer Brown, Friesen held on to his commitment to Estrada and continued working with Kelley and others on the case.

"I knew Larry because I'd been out to visit him several times and I was the main point of contact, so I just felt like I needed to stay on to give some continuity for him as well as for the claims in the case," Friesen said.

Friesen said that he did not feel the true import of the commutation of Estrada's death sentence until he went to visit him in prison. Estrada is now 46 years old.

"It took some time for it to hit me," Friesen said. "We had sent messages to him informing him of the ruling and about a week later I went to see him. Seeing the change in his demeanor and seeing him have hope again, that's when it really hit me."

Kelley said that as the news sank in that the Court of Criminal Appeals had accepted the agreed findings of fact that Estrada is intellectually disabled, he knew that more than two decades of work had paid off. That agreement in the state court capital murder case was reached in June 2024 between prosecutors at the Harris County District Attorney's Office and Estrada's legal team.

The district attorney's office says that under modern case law and clinical standards, Estrada likely wouldn't have been sentenced to death in the first place.

The Court of Criminal Appeals agreed that Estrada was ineligible for the death penalty given precedent established with the 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Atkins v. Virginia, which held that executing persons of diminished intellect amounts to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Constitution.

Kelley described Estrada as someone who may appear competent in a brief conversation, but who has a diminished intellectual capacity that makes him easy to lead and manipulate and who has trouble understanding the consequences of his actions. Kelley said a cousin of Estrada's involved him in the robbery plan and that Estrada was the only one "who didn't know or think about" wearing a mask during the crime.

"It doesn't make the crime that was committed any less heinous," Kelley said of Estrada's diminished capacity. "But in my view, there were other individuals far more culpable than our client. It's difficult to suggest when someone dies in a crime like what happened here that there are shades of culpability, but when you look at how limited intellectually our client is and how malleable he was, it's a pretty tragic situation."

Texas Department of Criminal Justice records show that Estrada's co-defendant is serving a life sentence.

Kelley and Friesen both said the ruling not only removed a looming execution from Estrada's reality but will result in real changes to his daily life. Estrada has been transferred from the restrictive unit that houses death row inmates to one where he has more freedom of movement and can interact with other inmates and enjoy increased visitation privileges.

"Death County" USA

In the 1990s, when Estrada was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death by lethal injection, Texas' Harris County had a reputation for being "death county," Kelley said. He noted that during that era defendants in Harris County were more likely to receive a death sentence than in any other U.S. jurisdiction.

Joshua Reiss, general counsel for the Harris County District Attorney's Office, said Estrada's was a "pre-Atkins case," referring to the U.S. Supreme Court's 2002 decision. Reiss noted that after the 2017 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Moore v. Texas, which held that Texas had to use contemporary clinical standards to evaluate a defendant's intellectual capacity, a number of the state's death penalty verdicts have been commuted to life terms.

"As defined by the [current clinical standards] he is intellectually disabled," Reiss said. "I told Mr. Kelley we were going to retain our own expert and if they came back and agreed [with the defense expert] that he is intellectually disabled, we're going to respect that opinion and I'm not going to fight it. And that is what occurred in Mr. Estrada's case."

Reiss also said Harris County seeks the death penalty less often now than in decades past.

"Today's practices likely would have caught Mr. Estrada's intellectual disability before he was tried for death," Reiss said. "If those procedures had been in place then and the law had been what it is today at the time of Mr. Estrada's trial, we likely would not have sought the death penalty."

Kelley said a movement among the legal community to revisit Texas death penalty cases from the era was picking up steam in the late 1990s when he attended a seminar on the subject and signed up along with other Mayer Brown lawyers to serve as court-appointed attorneys for Texas death penalty defendants.

As the Mayer Brown team dug into the case, they found "there was not a great record" and began requesting information from the city of Houston, the Harris County Sheriff's Dept. and Harris County through the Texas Public Information Act.

"We sent 13 requests on Mayer Brown letterhead and they were utterly ignored even though by statute, they had to respond within a fixed period of time," Kelley said. "Finally, with little choice, we filed a mandamus action in civil court in 2004."

Kelley said officials in Harris County rebuffed the requests and "engaged in all-out warfare, total scorched-earth policy,"

"They fought us tooth and nail, and they did several interlocutory appeals," Kelley said.

Estrada's federal habeas petition seeking to overturn his conviction, which Mayer Brown filed in 2003, was put on hold while the Texas Public Information Act case played out in state court for more than a decade. There were delays related to COVID-19, as well, Kelley said, but ultimately Estrada's team prevailed in their mandamus action and the state entities were ordered to hand over the documents and records the team had been seeking for so long.

Kelley said that while the firm could submit billing to the federal court for its efforts, it has not, and instead has pursued fees from Harris County for the years of work attorneys have performed related to the TPIA requests and subsequent mandamus action.

Mayer Brown was awarded about $1.2 million in fees by a jury in connection with Harris County's violations of the TPIA in Estrada's case. The award was overturned by a split Texas state appellate court in April.

Experts for the defense and the state eventually agreed to submit joint findings of fact and conclusions of law of Estrada's diminished intellectual capacity in the original capital murder case in Harris County. After the state district court entered the findings, they were submitted to the Court of Criminal Appeals and in April, the court commuted Estrada's death sentence to life.

Kelley filed a notice Monday of voluntary dismissal of Estrada's federal habeas petition in the Southern District of Texas.

"Make a Real Difference"

Burke Butler, executive director of the Texas Defender Service, a nonprofit that seeks to end excessive punishment in the Lone Star State, said death penalty cases involve complex and lengthy appellate work that routinely take years to work through the state and federal courts.

"These cases can be really complicated and they require a long-term commitment," Butler said. "Not every firm is willing or has the resources to do that and that is what is so extraordinary about Mayer Brown's work here. They knew at the front end that this wasn't going to just take six months and they were willing to be on the case and advocate for the client for the long haul."

Butler said death penalty appeals in Texas, while hard to litigate, can be incredibly fulfilling and compelling, particularly for lawyers who like a complex intellectual challenge.

Butler noted that, particularly during the period during which Estrada was sentenced to death, Texas "systematically" delivered poor representation to defendants facing a capital murder charge.

John Blume, executive director of the Death Penalty Project at Cornell University Law School, said the Court of Criminal Appeals had used outdated or nonscientific criteria to determine whether a person was intellectually deficient in Estrada's case and others. With the U.S. Supreme Court's 2017 decision in Moore v. Texas, however, the Texas court has shown more willingness to commute death sentences for defendants whose circumstances align with Atkins v. Virginia.

Blume noted that the opinion commuting Estrada's sentence adopted findings of intellectual deficiency made by a trial court and agreed upon by both the defense and the Harris County District Attorney's Office.

"He was very fortunate to have lawyers who developed a strong claim and were able to persuade the trial court," Blume said. "They made the Court of Criminal Appeals' job a little easier."

Reiss said Kelley and the other lawyers who fought for Estrada's post-conviction relief "are to be commended for their zealous advocacy."

"I think Mr. Estrada clearly should be thankful that he had Charles and the team working for him," Reiss said. "The folks at Mayer Brown, they did a good job."

While Texas defense attorneys must meet certain qualifications to sit first or second chair in a death penalty case and the state will fund a mitigation specialist and investigator, that was not always the case.

"There are often fundamental flaws and unfairness that happened in the underlying conviction that need to be thoroughly looked at," Butler said. "Intellectual disability, mental illness or an intense trauma history may be things the jury never heard about."

Butler said more cases that result in a death sentence have originated in Harris County than in any other U.S. state, except Texas, noting that 64 people on the state's death row were convicted in Harris County. Butler said Tarrant County comes in second with 13 defendants on death row.

"I hope that other law firms can step up to the plate the way Mayer Brown did," Butler said. "They can make a real difference."

--Editing by Orlando Lorenzo.

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