Two years after police found Melchor Gutierrez dead in his truck with multiple gunshot wounds to the head in October 2020, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office issued a capital murder warrant for a teen — referred to as "J.J.T.” in court documents — who authorities suspected played a role in Gutierrez’s death while robbing him during an alleged drug deal at 16 years old.
But J.J.T. wasn't arrested until well after his 18th birthday, which meant the juvenile court’s only options were to transfer his case to adult criminal court or dismiss it.
Now, the question before the Texas Supreme Court after oral arguments Tuesday isn’t whether J.J.T. is guilty — but whether Harris County could have charged him sooner and avoided transferring his case to an a venue in which he’d be given fewer alternatives.
And if the high court sides with the lower appeals court, J.J.T.'s case could be dismissed entirely.
The Texas Family Code generally allows for a transfer to adult criminal district court in two scenarios as it applies in this case: either it wasn’t feasible for the state to pursue the case in juvenile court for a reason outside the state’s control, or the state must prove that after its own due diligence, it didn’t have probable cause to proceed with the case before the juvenile’s 18th birthday — and new evidence has been found since the minor turned 18.
The purpose there, J.J.T.’s attorney Jerry Acosta told justices, is to put limits on whether prosecutors can go after adults for something they did as kids.
“To charge someone after they're 18, that's the exception,” Acosta said. “The state has to run through and has to prove — it's their burden to prove — that they couldn't proceed because of a reason beyond their control."
Juvenile court judges are tasked with considering a child's maturity, juvenile system history and the possibility of rehabilitation in criminal cases. A minor prosecuted in juvenile court may also have the chance to serve out some of their sentence in juvenile detention with the opportunity for probation.
After Gutierrez’s death, a Harris County sheriff’s deputy found a text conversation allegedly showing Gutierrez and then-17-year-old Alfonso Hernandez Tovar setting up a drug deal for Oct. 4, 2020, for one ounce of weed, according to court records.
J.J.T.’s brother told authorities Tovar and J.J.T. were best friends and spent a lot of time together. Fingerprint evidence ultimately tied Tovar to the crime scene, but not J.J.T.
Police arrested Tovar, and in November 2020 he told authorities that he, J.J.T. and another male were at the crime scene — but he said it was J.J.T. who shot Gutierrez and ran off with the stolen weed, not Tovar.
However, the DA’s office found that to be a “self-serving” statement prosecutors didn’t see as a credible admission of guilt or a reason to issue an arrest warrant.
“A purely blame-shifting statement — especially here where mere presence alone is not a crime — doesn't serve as a basis for probable cause,” said Melissa Stryker, who argued on behalf of the district attorney’s office.
But in late 2021, about a month before J.J.T.’s 18th birthday, court documents allege Tovar approached the sheriff’s office with even more information about the day of the killing — that he and J.J.T. came up with a plan to rob Gutierrez as they traveled back from Texas City that day. Tovar also gave deputies his own phone passcode — the sheriff’s office’s High-Tech Crime Unit had been trying to unlock Tovar’s phone using their GrayKey technology in a process that can take months or years.
It wasn’t until after that meeting — and about six months after J.J.T.’s 18th birthday — the deputy, David Crain, obtained a search warrant for J.J.T.’s phone records. Geographical data allegedly showed J.J.T. and Tovar were together before, during and after the time of the murder. That led to J.J.T.’s arrest for probable cause in late 2022.
After initially denying any involvement, J.J.T. eventually told authorities he was at the scene of the crime and grabbed the weed, but that Tovar fired the fatal shot.
It was enough to charge J.J.T. with capital murder: accomplices to a felony can be charged with the same offense as the alleged perpetrator under the Texas law of parties.
The DA's office asked the juvenile court to waive its control over the case and transfer J.J.T. to a criminal district court to be prosecuted as an adult in 2023.
There wasn’t any fingerprint, DNA, firearm, eyewitness or video evidence plainly implicating J.J.T. in the crime in the first year of the investigation — so while it was possible, it wasn’t reasonable or practicable for prosecutors to initiate a case against J.J.T. before he turned 18, the prosecutors argued. Crain had also testified he had a heavy caseload at the time and generally tried to avoid talking to minors until the sheriff’s office had enough information to arrest them.
“I think the state has an absolute obligation to pursue matters in the juvenile court when it can be done,” Stryker said. “But when they can't be accomplished reasonably in the juvenile court, that's when transfer is appropriate and these statutes come into play.”
But the transfer also heightens the stakes of the case for the now 20-year-old. If J.J.T. is tried as an adult and found guilty of capital murder, the only punishment the jury can consider is life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years because the alleged crime occurred when he was under 18.
While that’s less severe than the punishment for an alleged adult offender — who could get either life in prison without parole or the death penalty — it’s not much better, said Steven Halpert with the juvenile division of the Harris County Public Defender’s Office.
“It's essentially a death sentence,” Halpert said. “We put a little bow on it and say, ‘you can get out after 40 years.’ But nobody's surviving that.”
Houston’s First Court of Appeals reversed the juvenile court’s transfer decision and dismissed the case, stating Crain did have probable cause to pursue a case against J.J.T. and should have done so using Tovar’s initial statements, along with video evidence showing three males leaving the crime scene.
J.J.T.’s attorney Jerry Michael Acosta asked the Texas Supreme Court to uphold that decision.
“The courts have ruled that heavy caseloads, investigative preference — those are not reasons beyond the state's control,” Acosta said.
Justices questioned whether a ruling in the state’s favor would allow prosecutors to just wait until kids turn 18 to bring charges against them in order to avoid going through the trouble of transferring a case from juvenile to adult court. But they also questioned whether ruling in favor of defendants like J.J.T. would encourage prosecutors to file charges as soon as possible, which Stryker says could hurt defendants and law enforcement.
"As a general principle, pulling juvenile offenders into the criminal justice system before State has the necessary evidence to substantiate the offenses alleged against them is as dangerous and damaging as the State waiting too long to pursue juvenile petitions," Stryker wrote in a statement to KERA News. "The statutes provided by the Texas Legislature permit juvenile courts to strike the right balance between those two extremes, which is why the State requested review by the Texas Supreme Court in this instance.”
Halpert said he doesn’t believe prosecutors are waiting for offenders to turn 18 in order to take the easy route.
But he also doesn't see the high court issuing a ruling that establishes a definitive guideline in either of those hypotheticals.
“We rarely get that in adult or juvenile law," he said.
Got a tip? Email Toluwani Osibamowo at tosibamowo@kera.org. You can follow Toluwani on X @tosibamowo.
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