The Pardon and Parole Board on Tuesday rejected the clemency request for a man facing execution after he told the board he did not deserve nor want clemency.
Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez, 70, said he only attended his clemency hearing to apologize to the daughters of Olimpia Fisher, the woman he killed in 2003. The board voted 3-1 against recommending clemency, paving the way for Cuesta-Rodriguez to be executed on Aug. 13 by lethal injection.
With the exception of saying in English that “I don’t want any clemency” and didn’t “want any mercy,” Cuesta-Rodriguez addressed the board and Fisher’s family in Spanish. A translator sitting next to him at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, where he attended the hearing remotely, translated.
“I know that nothing I say will be enough to erase your pain, to offer some kind of comfort or get her back,” Cuesta-Rodriguez read in Spanish from a statement. “But I do want to tell you that I regret it and I am truly remorseful from the bottom of my heart. My time has come, and I want to leave, and I want to leave in peace. …And if I am forgiven some day, well, I will be forgiven. But it’s time for me to pay for what I did.”
Robert Reavis II, the Pardon and Parole Board chair, said he was “somewhat inclined” to vote for clemency, but chose not to after hearing Cuesta-Rodgriguez’s request.
Cuesta-Rodriguez was convicted of shooting Fisher, who was his girlfriend, in the eyes during a fight in their shared Oklahoma City home.
Cuesta-Rodriguez’s attorney Emma Rolls, a public defender with the Western District of Oklahoma, told the parole board that he had endured trauma, leaving him with PTSD, depression and other health issues not originally introduced in his trial.
He escaped poverty and abuse in Cuba in 1980 and continued to experience side effects from a severe injury he suffered while working a construction job in Oklahoma City in 1995. He was using alcohol and steroids at the time of the killing, which impacted his mental wellbeing, his attorneys said.
But attorneys for the state argued those experiences do not negate the harm caused and argued his mental health issues were self-reported and examinations were unreliably administered.
Michel Trapasso, the assistant attorney general with the state’s Attorney General’s Office, also said Cuesta-Rodriguez had a history of abuse and stalked Fisher before killing her.
Fisher’s daughter, Katya Wallis, witnessed the first shot. At the time, she was 18 and five months pregnant.
She said on Tuesday that Cuesta-Rodriguez could have helped her mother as she choked on her blood in the minutes after he shot her, but instead chose to shoot her again.
“Carlos chose to take my mother’s life,” Willis said. “He didn’t just hurt her. He hurt all of us who knew her, who loved her, who needed her. He took a great person who did not deserve to die.”
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