Joseph Ebron was sentenced to death by the Federal Government for the murder of a fellow inmate at the Beaumont Prison in Texas. According to court documents the prison murder was the third person that Joseph Ebron has committed the first being when he was just fifteen years old and the second when he was seventeen. Joseph Ebron was serving a life sentence when he would help another inmate, Marwin Mosley, murder the inmate who was stabbed one hundred six times. Due to Joseph Ebron past criminal activities it did not take the jury long to find him guilty and sentence him to death.
Joseph Ebron 2021 Information
| Register Number: 08655-007 | |
| Age: | 42 |
| Race: | Black |
| Sex: | Male |
| Located at: Terre Haute USP | |
| Release Date: DEATH SENT |
Joseph Ebron More News
Jurors sentenced a Washington, D.C., man to death Monday for the murder of a fellow inmate at the federal prison in Beaumont.
Joseph Ebron, 30, was found guilty of helping with the May 7, 2005, stabbing death of Keith Barnes. It was the third murder Ebron’s has been convicted of in the last 15 years.
Ebron reacted violently to the announcement, according to federal prosecutors Joeseph Batte and John Craft, leaping to his feet, screaming obscenities and tossing a water pitcher in Batte’s direction before he was tackled by U.S. marshals.
No one was struck by the pitcher, Batte said.
Batte told the Beaumont Enterprise that Ebron’s two prior murder convictions, the first of which was committed when he was 15, likely contributed to the jury’s decision to impose the death penalty. Ebron committed the second murder in 1997 when he was 17, jurors heard, only a few months after being released from a Colorado youth correctional facility and returning to Washington, D.C.
“Ladies and gentlemen, there’s been a fire burning in Joseph Ebron since he was 15 years old, a fire that’s continued to burn throughout his adult life up to 2005, and I’d submit to you it is still burning,” Batte told jurors in his closing argument.
In the most recent killing, jurors heard, Ebron restrained Barnes while another inmate, Marwin Mosley, stabbed Barnes in the chest 106 times for reportedly testifying against a mutual associate. Mosley later killed himself in prison, a defense attorney said.
Batte and Craft argued that a death sentence is appropriate, in part, because as long as he is alive Ebron poses a threat to fellow inmates and correctional officers.
Katherine Scardino, one of the two Houston-based attorneys who defended Ebron, said that Ebron should be assigned an attorney to work on an appeal soon.
“There were a couple of points we felt like that were an issue for an appellate lawyer,” Scardino said
Scardino and Phillips submitted 35 mitigating factors for jurors to consider, many related to Ebron’s difficult childhood.
Ebron’s biological mother abandoned his family when he was 6 months old, jurors heard, and his father was coping with a heroin addiction while not in prison, providing little emotional support. The southeast Washington, D.C., neighborhood he grew up in is a high-crime area, an environment that interfered with his moral development. Since he was 15, Ebron’s attorneys noted, he has spent most of his life behind bars.
“This is Joseph Ebron’s world, but Joseph Ebron is going to live or die based on a world he’s never had a chance to live in, our world,” Phillips said in his closing. “But we must judge it by our rules.”
Ebron’s attorneys argued that he did not take a lead role in deciding to kill Barnes, but was instead brought into a plan already in place hours before it was executed. If Mosley and the other co-conspirators had not run into Ebron in the recreation yard that day, Barnes still would have been killed, Phillips argued, without Ebron’s participation.
Allowing him to live, prosecutors argued, would send the message to other prisoners that they can get away with murder.
“That fire that has been burning still is, and now it’s the time for you to put it out,” Batte told jurors at the end of his closing argument.
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Man-condemned-for-killing-fellow-inmate-1741090.php
