Cedric Ricks spoke in his own defense at his 2013 murder trial, something most defendants accused of a terrible crime do not do. Ricks confessed that he had killed his girlfriend, Roxann Sanchez, and her 8-year-old son. He admitted he was aggressive and had trouble controlling his anger, stating that he was “sorry about everything.” The Tarrant County jury was unmoved. Ricks has spent the last 13 years on death row and is scheduled to be executed on March 11.
Ricks’ attorneys with the Federal Public Defenders Office have scoured the records of his case over the last five years, looking for ways to stop his execution. In 2024, they appealed his conviction to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that prosecutors had improperly excluded Black women from his jury. They presented notes turned over by the state showing that prosecutors had annotated and color-coded the names of people appearing for jury duty to emphasize their race and gender with letters like “B/F,” “AA,” and “H.” Various courts have denied the appeal along with Ricks’ claim that his trial attorney was ineffective for not making the argument earlier.
Ricks’ attorneys have also appealed his conviction on the grounds that the jury was allowed to see him wearing shackles at his trial. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that seeing a defendant in shackles undermines the presumption that they are innocent and thus violates their due process rights laid out in the Fifth and 14th Amendments. Ricks’ attorneys argued that the prosecutors at his trial even went out of their way to mention the shackling during the punishment phase of his trial, writing, “[T]he State all but told the jury it could know that Ricks would be a future danger because ‘[y]ou saw him walk back to counsel table this morning with shackles on.’” The shackling appeal has also been rejected, with judges ruling that it wouldn’t have changed his sentence and that he didn’t bring it up at the appropriate moment in the appeals process…