A man convicted of fatally shooting a Dallas police officer in 2007 is scheduled to die by lethal injection Wednesday in Huntsville.
Wesley Lynn Ruiz, 43, was sentenced to death in July 2008 for the slaying of Mark Nix after a high-speed chase through West Dallas. Nix leapt out of his squad car, ran to the car where Ruiz hid and swung his baton repeatedly at the front passenger window to break it. The officer had just managed a small hole in the window when Ruiz fired one gunshot from inside the vehicle, killing Nix.
Ruiz filed a motion last week to halt the execution, saying prosecutors violated his constitutional rights when they allowed an expert to give false testimony. He also argued some jurors harbored racial bias against him, according to court records. Ruiz is Hispanic. The motion was denied Friday by Judge David C. Godbey in the U.S. Northern District of Texas.
Ruiz recently filed a lawsuit with two other death row inmates that alleged Texas plans to use expired, unsafe drugs for executions in violation of state law. A University of South Carolina pharmacology professor who reviewed state records said some pentobarbital vials were more than 630 days old and others were more than 1,300 days old. Their beyond use date limit is 24 hours when stored at room temperature, and 45 days if such compounded drugs are frozen.
Prison officials denied the allegations and said the state’s pentobarbital supply is safe. A civil court sided with the inmates, but Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, saying the case should be decided by a criminal court, not a civil one. The state’s high court agreed.
One of the three inmates, Robert Fratta, was put to death last month. Ruiz’s attorney, Shawn Nolan, did not respond to a request for comment.
Ruiz hasn’t denied that he fired the shot that killed Nix, a 33-year-old senior corporal. But he argued during his capital murder trial he acted in self-defense and he feared for his life because he thought police shot at the car where he hid.
Jurors deliberated about three hours before they rejected Ruiz’s argument. The same jury then sentenced him to die.
The chase and slaying
Police pursued Ruiz on March 23, 2007, because the car he drove matched the description of a vehicle connected to a homicide in Dallas earlier that week. Police determined later Ruiz was not involved in that slaying.
Police said Ruiz was a methamphetamine dealer and known gang member who’d been convicted in Dallas of charges related to drugs, weapons and burglary. Ruiz testified he had a gun and methamphetamine in his car, which were probation violations that could’ve landed him in prison. So, he said, he fled.
Ruiz led Nix and other officers on a short chase before he spun out and crashed in front of a house. Ruiz shot Nix as the officer used a baton to beat the front passenger window.
Nix fell to the ground as he grabbed his face and neck, video footage played during the trial showed.
Other officers unleashed a barrage of gunfire in response. After a standoff, Ruiz was dragged out of the car and taken to a hospital. He was shot nine times.
Ruiz testified he pulled a gun from a gym bag in the backseat and fired out of fear.
Prosecutors told jurors to doubt Ruiz’s truthfulness. Ruiz did all he could the day of the shooting to evade police and avoid prison time, and he was doing the same in the courtroom, they argued.
Nix was the 77th Dallas police officer to die in the line of duty. He’d been with the department about seven years. He’d also served in Iraq as a Navy corpsman in 2003, and was a member in the Army reserve.
Nix’s mother, Cheryle Nix, declined to comment when reached by phone Tuesday. She previously said her son’s sacrifice drove home the daily risks officers face, and Nix “loved his job, loved what he did.”
She’s also offered advice to families of other Dallas officers who were slain, including the loved ones of those fatally shot by a sniper July 7, 2016, during an ambush downtown. One DART officer and four Dallas police officers were killed during what had been a peaceful protest for Black lives.
“Don’t beat yourself up and tell yourself to get over it,” she told other families in 2017. “Because you never will get over it.”
Nix’s colleagues described him as a reliable officer who was always eager to help. He tried to answer every call he could, and consistently exceeded expectations, officers said after his death.
“Someone was going to have to approach that vehicle,” then-Deputy Chief Charles Cato, who is now the DART police chief, said at the time. “Mark was going to be that man.”
Attempts to halt the execution
If the execution carries on as planned, Ruiz will become the 580th prisoner put to death in Texas since 1982, according to state statistics.
Texas leads the nation in executions since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The state has the third-highest number of death row inmates in the U.S., behind California and Florida, according to the advocacy group the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
The group encouraged people to request clemency for Ruiz, writing online that Ruiz is “deeply remorseful” and has worked to better himself on death row, including through a close relationship with his two sons.
The group said the jury didn’t hear about the adversity he faced as a child, including sexual molestation, neglect and abandonment by his parents, homelessness, trauma and brain damage. The coalition said he had bad experiences with officers who “did not believe him when he was the victim of a crime.”
Barbara Ruiz, Ruiz’s mother, testified during the sentencing trial she had a history of abusing drugs and alcohol, which was partially to blame for the shooting. She was absent for a long stretch of her son’s life, she said.
Ruiz’s recent requests to spare his life centered on an expert’s trial testimony. In motions filed last week and in 2020, Ruiz argued that a witness for the state, A.P. Merillat, gave false information during the trial. Merillat said Ruiz would be eligible for a less restrictive inmate classification status after 10 years if sentenced to life in prison.
Those were the state’s previous rules, which were changed in 2005, and would no longer have applied to Ruiz, according to court records.
Ruiz also said some jurors viewed him as violent because he is Hispanic, citing language they used in affidavits that included calling Ruiz a “thug” and a “punk.” He alleged that a juror presumed other Hispanic people at the trial were gang members, and at one point said Ruiz behaved like “a mad dog” and “an animal.”
That bias, coupled with the expert’s incorrect testimony, influenced jurors to choose a death sentence instead of life in prison, Ruiz argued.
But Godbey, the judge who denied the most recent motion, said the expert’s information was outdated, not a malicious attempt to mislead the jury, and was corroborated by the defense’s own expert witness. He said Ruiz did not file the motion in a reasonable timeframe despite having had access to the information, and there is no evidence the outcome of the sentencing trial would’ve been different if prosecutors corrected their expert.
Godbey also said trial evidence shows Ruiz had been immersed in “a world of drugs, guns and violence” and it wasn’t surprising jurors believed he was a violent criminal.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
