ODESSA, Texas — Michael 'Spider' Gonzales was back in Odessa court Thursday for an evidentiary hearing regarding his murder case from 1994. Gonzales is the man who was convicted in 1995 and sentenced to death for murdering two Odessans: Manuel and Merced Aguirre.
Gonzales was supposed to be executed in 2022 but was granted a stay of execution.
His co-counsel, Richard Burr, told NewsWest 9 that this all stems back to Gonzales' execution and seeing if Gonzales is even able to meet the guidelines of being in line for his death penalty.
"In 2022 the Court of Criminal Appeals sent this case back to Judge Schrode for him to consider two issues," Burr said. "One of them is whether he has [an] intellectual disability because if you do have intellectual disability under Supreme Court decisions, you can no longer have a death sentence or be executed."
Since Thursday's evidentiary hearing was on the issue of whether Gonzales was intellectually disabled, both the state and defense were able to agree on one thing.
"[...] our experts agreed that he, they, both experts, our experts, and Gonzalez's experts agree that he is mildly intellectually disabled," State Attorney Travis Bragg said.
"Generally, when there is a question of intellectual disability, the expert for the state and the expert with the defense tend to disagree with each other, the defense expert says the person has intellectual disability. The state expert says no," Burr said. "In this case, rarely as it's quite rare, the state expert agrees, the state's expert agrees that he does have [an] intellectual disability, so there's really no dispute between the state and the defense on that issue."
Because of this, a dozen new pieces of evidence have been made available, including some expert reports.
The defense has two expert reports: one is from a professor from the University of Houston: Dr. Jack Fletcher, who is an internationally recognized expert on developmental issues in people.
Their other expert is a professor at Baylor Medical School named Adriana Strutt, who did the intellectual testing for Gonzalez.
The state’s expert report is from a doctor named Dr. Timothy Proctor.
"He's been doing this work for several decades, and he generally works as a state expert and generally agrees that with the state's position on this issue that the person does not have intellectual disability, he did not do that here," Burr said about Dr. Proctor. "He thoroughly evaluated Mr. Gonzalez, talked to a lot of the other witnesses and after that he decided he agreed with the defense experts."
Also being put into evidence are nine affidavits from people who had meaningful relationships with Gonzales as he was growing up, including teachers and extended family members.
"Those are the people who you know, observed and had a lot of experiences with him about how he could not do things that most children can do," the defense said.
And if Gonzales' death sentence is overturned, his life won't be cut short -- but instead, he'll be spending the rest of his life behind bars.
As of right now, there's no date set for when Gonzalez will return back to court after the evidence is evaluated.