Will Texas Execute a Mentally Ill Man?

Last month, the state of Texas executed Jamaal Howard, a man who showed evidence of serious mental illness at the time of his crime and who was treated for schizoaffective disorder after arriving on death row. Now, state officials are preparing to kill a man for whom there is even more evidence of mental illness – John Rubio. 

Rubio is set to be executed on Nov. 12 for beheading his three young children, a toddler and two infants. He was tried and convicted of capital murder in 2003 and again at a retrial in 2010, with his attorneys offering an insanity defense in both cases. The trials and later appeals provided details on Rubio’s increasingly bizarre behavior in the days leading up to his crime, as he descended into a delusion that he was the hero in a good-versus-evil struggle to save humanity.

A 2024 appeal states that on the evening of the murders, Rubio passed an egg over his daughter, Julissa, cracked it into a glass of water, and concluded that she had been attacked by evil spirits. Early that morning, he nailed the back door of the family’s apartment shut and threw a blanket over the bedroom mirror. He told his wife, Angela Camacho, that he was one of seven good men on Earth engaged in a struggle with an equal number of bad men. He told her their three children had been possessed by the spirit of his dead grandmother, who he believed to be a witch. Then, partly with Camacho’s help, he cut the heads off the three babies and placed the bodies in a plastic bag. Hours later, he and Camacho surrendered to police after Rubio’s brother and a friend found the bodies and notified law enforcement.

Rubio was ruled competent to stand trial in 2003. His attorneys prepared an insanity defense and asked two psychiatrists to evaluate his mental state, particularly whether he knew the murders he had committed were morally wrong. The psychiatrists testified that Rubio was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia at the time of the murders and did not know his actions were wrong. 

However, according to the 2024 appeal, Rubio’s attorneys had not asked the psychiatrists the proper question to save him from the death penalty. In order to prove insanity, Texas law requires a jury to find that a defendant was unaware at the time of his crime that his actions were illegal – rather than immoral. Prosecutors pointed out during the sentencing phase of Rubio’s trial that the defense had not made the necessary argument. They presented their own psychiatrist who disputed that Rubio had suffered from schizophrenia or any other brain disease. The jury sided with the prosecution. 

Rubio appealed his sentence, arguing, among other things, that his trial attorneys had failed to investigate the possibility that he suffered from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD), which causes brain damage and mental illness, and makes an offender less culpable for their actions. The trial attorneys admitted during a hearing on the appeal that they had provided an ineffective defense. The judge opined that Rubio might have been sentenced to life without parole, rather than death, had that option been available to the jury at the time he was tried (the law allowing for the life-without-parole sentencing option went into effect after Rubio’s trial). But the judge ultimately rejected the appeal. 

Rubio’s current attorneys have asked the federal courts to reassess whether he received a fair trial, arguing that his original attorneys should have suspected that he suffered from FASD, given that they knew his mother had used drugs during her pregnancy with him. They have also argued that even though Rubio’s mental health was the central question in the case, the attorneys never presented evidence at his retrial that he had been heavily medicated with Thorazine, Risperdal, and various antidepressants since entering death row in 2003 and that he had been held in a prison for mentally ill inmates at various times.  

Rubio’s attorneys did not respond to the Chronicle’s requests for comment regarding the filing of any further appeals on Rubio’s behalf.

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