Do Not Execute DaRoyce Mosley!

The state of Texas is set to execute DaRoyce Mosley on August 28 for the July 1994 murders of Patricia and Duane Colter, Alvin Waller and Luva Congleton in Gregg County, TX.

Texas should not execute Mosley for his role in this crime. Executing Mosley would violate the right to life as declared in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and constitute the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. Furthermore, Mosley maintains his innocence. His signed a confession after hours of interrogation without a lawyer present. His uncle, a codefendant in the case, testified against Mosley and received a life sentence, yet several people have come forth saying that his uncle bragged to them about committing the crime.

Even though Mosley’s childhood was unstable due to his mother’s drug habits, he graduated from high school with honors and had a good reputation in his town.

Please write to Gov. Rick Perry on behalf of DaRoyce Mosley!

Full Texas Monthly article from 1996
http://www.daroycemosley.com/daroyce.pdf

From Texas Monthly…Nineteen-year-old Goat Hill resident DaRoyce Mosley, a former honors student at Kilgore High School, member of the student council, and starter on the basketball team who had gone on to Kilgore College was accused of 4 murders in a Kilgore Bar, Katie’s.

…After an all-night interrogation, DaRoyce had signed a confession in which he admitted that he had agreed to accompany his 31-year-old uncle, Ray Don Mosley, on a robbery along with Marcus Smith, a 16yearold Goat Hill teenager with a juvenile record. DaRoyce said that although he had tried several times that night to back out of the robbery, his uncle Ray Don, one of the most feared criminals in the Goat Hill neighborhood, persuaded him to come inside the bar. “I had never done anything bad before, and I felt like doing something bad,” DaRoyce said in the confession. After they walked in, he said, Ray Don shot Sandra Cash. “The people looked at me and it scared me and I shot a lady at a table,” DaRoyce said. He then said Ray Don pointed a gun at him and ordered him to kill everyone else or be shot himself. For the police, the case was open and shut. But plenty of Kilgore’s citizens were convinced that the confession was not the truth. DaRovce’s friends insisted that he hated guns: When he had gone along with them on camping trips, he wouldn’t hold a gun, let alone shoot one.

A psychiatrist and a psychologist who arrived separately to interview DaRoyce said that nothing about his personality fit the profile of a mass murderer. It was also peculiar, they said, that DaRoyce had given -a series of different stories during his all-night interrogation before finally saying that he did the killings. “I believe that, during the night he confessed, he was under intense pressure, emotionally broken down, his mind almost dissociated from reality,” said Louis-Victor Jeantv, an Austin psychiatrist who spoke to DaRoyce for several hours. “He was trying to please a group of angry police officers because that is his nature.”

After his arrest. DaRoyce told his attorneys that he had been so scared during his interrogation that he had lied to the police. The real story, he said, was that in a moment of weakness, trying to prove to a belligerent Ray Don that he was not a “punk,” he went along on the robbery but ran out the door once Ray Don started shooting. To those who knew the strapping, insolent Ray Dononce described by a lawyer as “a walking piece of dynamite”-it was absurd that the police were apparently believing his confession, in which he said that he shot Sandra Cash but then threw down his gun once DaRoyce began shooting everyone else. Did the police really think that Ray Don Mosley, the man who organized the Katie’s robbery, deliberately dropped his gun? At least five Goat H ill residents later gave sworn statements that they personally heard Ray Don claim he had murdered everyone at Katie ‘s. (Ray Don would not be interview d for this article .) Charline Jackson, Ray Don’s sister and DaRoyce’s mother, said Ray Don came by h r house , told her he had committed the killings , and then adde d that he enjoyed looking at the blood coming out of the backs of the white people’s heads.

For a death penalty case, in w hich the truth is supposed to be obvious , there seemed to be as many questions as answers. Indeed the case sent the town into turmoil, forcing its citizens to confront the fine line between guilt and innocence and between justice and compassion. As one longtime teacher at the high school would later say, “After DaRoyce’s arrest, none of us here were ever the same again.”