Does DaRoyce Mosley Deserve to Die?
Raised in Kilgore’s poorest black neighborhood, he was an honors graduate with a bright future—until he was convicted of killing four whites. But the case is still hotly disputed, and the question remains…Does DaRoyce Mosley Deserve to Die?
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After the jury of eleven whites and one black was finally seated, Gregg County district attorney David Brabham—a wiry man with a thick East Texas drawl and a forceful speaking style—told jurors that DaRoyce’s confession superseded any of what he called the “technical arguments” of defense attorneys. “DaRoyce went into Katie’s Lounge for the thrill of it, for the thrill of doing something devious,” Brabham said. DaRoyce, who had turned 21 the day before testimony began, sat quietly at the defense table in a gray jacket, dark pants, and a purplish tie. There were days when he softly waved to some nicely dressed white spectators who sat toward the back: parents and former high school classmates from the wealthier side of town. His grandmother Francis, and his mother, Charline, who had gotten off drugs and started singing in the church choir, whispered “We love you” as he was escorted in and out of the courtroom each day. It was hard for the people in the courtroom not to like him. During a recess, state district judge Alvin Khoury, who was presiding over the trial, gave DaRoyce a chocolate-chip cookie.
One of the trial’s most dramatic moments came when Chris “Caboo” Smith was wheeled to the witness stand. In a mumbling voice, he told the jury that on the night of the shootings, DaRoyce came back to his house and said, “We did it.” He said DaRoyce told him that he had shot the woman under the pool table. When Caboo was asked if DaRoyce had ever said that Ray Don had threatened or intimidated him, Caboo said no. DaRoyce appeared flabbergasted. Bledsoe tried to show that Caboo was biased because he is Marcus Smith’s first cousin. (Marcus earlier had been given only a two-year sentence at a juvenile facility because the juvenile judge concluded that he had left Katie’s before the crime was committed.) But Caboo said in court that he was DaRoyce’s “best friend.” Desperate, Bledsoe tried to paint Caboo as a drug dealer who couldn’t be trusted, based upon the fact that Caboo sat out in front of his house while people drove by. Caboo just shook his head and said he didn’t deal drugs.
Later, when DaRoyce’s final confession was read aloud, jurors could be seen giving angry looks his way. In response, Louis-Victor Jeanty and Gary Mears, a Tyler psychologist who also had seen DaRoyce, testified that they thought the confession was unreliable. They gave various explanations of why DaRoyce might have said those things: He was already guilt-ridden about going along with Ray Don’s burglary scheme, he was slightly delusional because he had been kept up throughout the night, or he thought the police would stop badgering him if he just said what he thought they wanted him to say.
The explanations might have been more persuasive if the jurors had heard from DaRoyce himself. But the defense lawyers didn’t call him to the stand. (Bledsoe told me he was worried that DaRoyce would be “too susceptible” to Brabham’s suggestions.) What’s more, when the defense tried to present testimony showing Ray Don to be a murderer, Judge Khoury ruled it inadmissible, proclaiming, “Ray Don Mosley is not the one on trial here.”
The law in a death penalty case required prosecutors to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there was a “probability” DaRoyce would commit future acts of criminal violence—which they never did. The lone witness they could find to testify about DaRoyce’s allegedly violent personality was a longtime Kilgore High School history teacher named Marita Ann Ater, who had a reputation, one former student later said, as “a busybody meddling type.” Ater testified that when she taught DaRoyce in 1992, he was so disruptive that she sent a small stack of disciplinary notes about him to the office. More than just being the class clown, she said, “he craved attention.” She said when she once told him that he could do great things some day if he just harnessed his energy, he replied, “I will be famous some day, but it won’t be by following your dumb rules.”
It seemed preposterous that prosecutors believed DaRoyce should be put to death based on a teacher’s assertions that he had acted up in her classroom. The defense presented other teachers who said DaRoyce was not a discipline problem, and the school’s vice principal testified that he never received any notes from Ater about DaRoyce. But in their final arguments, prosecutors asked the jurors to imagine DaRoyce standing behind them when they are at a convenience store. “Wouldn’t your heart skip a beat?” assistant prosecutor Rebecca Simpson asked. The jurors listened closely, and after an afternoon’s deliberation, they returned to the courtroom to announce their decision. They had determined that DaRoyce would constitute a constant and violent threat to society and that there were no mitigating circumstances to justify a life sentence in prison. Judge Khoury asked DaRoyce to stand before the bench. “DaRoyce,” he said in even tones, “by law, I have no choice but to assess your punishment as death.”
For a moment DaRoyce didn’t move. Then he looked at Bledsoe, the man who had become his father figure, and mouthed, “What?” Charline rose, then collapsed on the floor, her body convulsing spasmodically. The victims’ relatives hugged and wept. Outside in the hallway, a distraught black woman told a television reporter, “You people know that if it had been a white person who had killed all those people, he wouldn’t have gotten the death penalty.” But Brabham was unmoved. “DaRoyce was exposed to opportunities,” he said. “He had the intelligence and the ability to do something with his life, and he chose to go the other way.” When I later asked Brabham whether he would also seek the death penalty in Ray Don’s case, he paused, then finally said, “The case is still pending, and that’s all I can say on the matter.”
WEEKS LATER, KILGORE CITIZENS were still talking about the trial. Some were able to explain away the discrepancies in DaRoyce’s case by saying that as long as he was involved in something in which innocent people were killed, he should pay. “If DaRoyce hadn’t gone along, maybe Ray Don would have backed out,” one Kilgore resident who sat through the trial told me. But when I talked to Ron Dodson, he shook his head and said, “Goddam, I hate to sound liberal, I really do. But there are too many questions about this case for it to end with the death penalty. This kid participated in a robbery in which four people were killed—and that should definitely involve a jail term. But putting this kid to death? Oh, man, no.”
At the all-black, 122-year-old Kilgore Baptist Church, where Charline sang in the choir, the Reverend Gary Walker preached about Jesus’ followers in the New Testament who had been thrown in jail. “The Lord opened the prison doors for them, and he can do it for us,” Walker said. Meanwhile, at Katie’s, where the dark bloodstains from the killings were still visible on the carpet, I heard a man cheerfully tell a new barmaid, “Don’t you worry, honey. As long as I’m sitting here, no nigger’s going to come through that door alive.”
In mid-December I parked outside the red-brick walls of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Ellis I Unit, near Huntsville. A prison guard in a watchtower buzzed me through the barbed-wire gates. In the small front yard of the unit was a nativity scene; a banner reading “Merry Christmas” had been placed above the front door. In the room where visitors are allowed to talk to death row inmates, DaRoyce came out in handcuffs, followed by a prison guard. A thick wire screen separated us, but when I leaned forward, I was able to see DaRoyce giving me that same sympathetic smile. “It’s unreal,” he said. “It’s unreal.”
He told me that just before his transfer to the Ellis I Unit, he had seen Ray Don in the county jail. He said Ray Don promised to tell the police the truth about the shootings. “But saying and doing are two different things,” DaRoyce said. “I have no way of knowing what he’ll do. I don’t know how to get him to tell the truth.”
Eventually, I got to the question I had been wanting to ask him since the trial. Why did he confess to all the killings after the ATF agent told him there might be gunpowder residue on his glove? DaRoyce shrugged and told me that on the way to Katie’s that night, when the three of them were in some woods, he had pulled out the gun and shot it into the air just to see what it felt like. “You got to realize,” he said, “that I had the glove on when I shot the gun. And Ray Don had told me that was the gun he had used to kill the people. So I felt like it [the murder rap] was going to come back on me.”
I stared at him. In their earlier statements, no one—not Ray Don, not Marcus, not DaRoyce himself—had said anything about DaRoyce’s shooting a gun in the woods. He could tell I was skeptical about this latest story. “But what did you possibly think was the advantage of confessing?” I asked.
“I thought it would be a lot easier on me if I said I was forced to do it, that Ray Don made me do it against my will.”
DaRoyce might have been telling the truth. Ballistics experts testified that any gunpowder residue on his glove could have been washed off by the heavy rain that fell in Kilgore shortly after the shootings. And the police had never been able to locate all the bullets in Katie’s that supposedly came from his gun that night. Still, it was a difficult story for me to swallow. I doubted that I was ever going to know for sure what DaRoyce had done on that one crazed, panic-stricken night in which he gave in to the diseased culture of Goat Hill and the relentless prodding of his uncle.
A prison official walked by to notify me that my time was up. The official had other work to do: The execution of a young black man who had shot a Dallas police officer was scheduled for that night. The man had been kept in a cell just three cellblocks away from DaRoyce’s. “You know I shouldn’t be here. You know I shouldn’t be here,” DaRoyce said to me as I rose. “I’m different than these other guys. They’re like Ray Don—his type of people, people always in trouble.”
A guard put the handcuffs on DaRoyce and began to lead him away. But DaRoyce turned and asked, “You aren’t going to give up on me, are you?” I didn’t know what to say. There was a metallic sound as the prison door closed behind him.
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