Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot says he is not against capital punishment.
But, he says, he strictly looks for certain criteria when deciding whether to pursue the death penalty against someone his office is prosecuting.
Accused serial killer Billy Chemirmir, who stands trial this week, didn’t meet the criteria. In fact, Creuzot’s office hasn’t sought the death penalty for a single defendant since he became district attorney in 2019.
“It’s my position that a death penalty should be pursued if you know that you can prove the elements of it,” Creuzot said.
The former judge isn’t talking about just proving that a person is guilty. Texas requires that juries find that a person convicted of a capital crime still poses a danger to society before imposing a death sentence.
The phrase on a verdict form is “whether there is a probability that the defendant would commit criminal acts of violence that would constitute a continuing threat to society.”
It’s guesswork, Creuzot said. Prosecutors across the state have tried to answer the question by calling behavioral experts to analyze the person on trial and testify about their likelihood of committing future violence.
Creuzot said he considers how a person has behaved while incarcerated because the state allows for a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole in capital cases. Removing any chance of a capital murder convict walking the streets with the rest of society, the question becomes whether they’ll be a danger to prison guards and fellow inmates.
Creuzot looks at prior incarcerations, whether the person has previously been sentenced to prison or while they’re awaiting trial in the county jail.
Chemirmir, who is accused of smothering to death more than a dozen elderly women in senior-living facilities and stealing their jewelry, was arrested in March 2018 and has been in the Dallas County jail since then.
In that time, the sheriff department’s staff hasn’t reported any problems with him, Creuzot said.
“He’s quiet as a mouse,” Creuzot said. “There’s nothing about him to suggest that he would inflict any kind of meaningful harm or violence on anybody in the penal society.”
Prosecutors initially planned on asking jurors to sentence Chemirmir to death. They filed paperwork with the court in July 2019 announcing their intent to seek capital punishment.
But lead prosecutor Glen Fitzmartin told victims’ families that he used the threat of execution in an attempt to persuade Chemirmir to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence and spare everyone a trial. Chemirmir rejected the offer.
After Creuzot’s decision, some called on Collin County District Attorney Greg Willis to seek capital punishment for Chemirmir in the Frisco and Plano cases his office is prosecuting. The office declined to comment Friday while the cases are pending.
Pursuing the death penalty would be costly, Creuzot told the families. Taxpayer dollars would likely be spent on sending the defense team to Kenya, where Chemirmir is from, to investigate his background for mitigating circumstances that the law says jurors must consider before imposing death. And if jurors issued a death sentence, many years of appeals would surely follow the trial.
But there’s also a great chance a jury wouldn’t recommend death, Creuzot reasoned.
Executions have declined across the U.S. since 2018, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C. Twenty-three states have abolished the death penalty.
Americans’ approval of capital punishment had been waning, and in 2016 fewer than 50 percent of U.S. adults polled said they did not support executions, according to the Pew Research Center.
But support was up this year, with 60 percent of surveyed people saying they were in favor of the ultimate sentence, Pew researchers reported.
Creuzot said the death penalty isn’t off the table for him in future cases.
“I believe in its limited applicability,” he said.
