Judge disqualifies prosecutor from triple-murder suspect’s trial

Judge Luis Aguilar has disqualified Assistant District Attorney Denise Butterworth from prosecuting Luis Solis-Gonzalez.

Solis-Gonzalez is facing capital murder charges and a potential death sentence for the killing of 13-year-old Cassaundra Holt, her mother Marysol Saldivar, and Saldivar’s boyfriend, Eric Desantiago. Their bodies were found on May 31, 2012 inside a home in East El Paso.

Solis-Gonzalez was arrested the following day. He is being held without bond in the El Paso County Jail.

The defense asked Butterworth be disqualified because she was present when a police detective interviewed a 3-year-old boy who witnessed the killings. The defense argued Butterworth’s presence during the interview essentially makes her a witness.

“Once they take their hat off as a prosecutor and put their investigative hat on to actually see what witnesses are saying, to see what might be asked of the witnesses, how they might formulate the witnesses, then they become investigators,” defense attorney Joe Spencer said.

Spencer told ABC-7 the “gold standard” of a child forensic interview is that the child should testify only a single time and it has to be done right.

“A prosecutor who is building his or her case has the ability to listen to what is being said and to manipulate and formulate the type of questions and answers during that interview,” Spencer said, “That’s a real danger when a prosecutor gets that involved in the investigative process. Police departments are trained to do that and they’re very well qualified to do that.”

Spencer said the district attorney or his assistants should not be allowed to visit crime scenes either. ” If they start instructing crime scene technicians on what evidence to collect, what evidence not to collect, how is that fundamentally fair,” Spencer asked.

District Attorney Jaime Esparza told ABC-7 he plans to appeal the ruling. “Assistant District Attorney Butterworth has been the prosecutor assigned to the case from the beginning. The defense has never objected to her being the prosecutor until 2 weeks ago,” Esparza said.

In May 2016, the El Paso District Attorney’s Office confirmed the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals denied the assertion by the defense that all 200 pieces of evidence need to be tested for DNA evidence before proceeding to jury trial.

A law recently passed by the Texas Legislature allows for defendants to have all evidence that may contain biological substances tested before proceeding to trial.

Spencer had argued in district court in May 2015 that it was his client’s right to have all evidence tested. The motion was contested by the prosecution and was ultimately sent to the appeals court for review, further delaying the trial by almost a year.

“What would be a real tragedy is if we rushed to trial in this case and there was some procedural error, or constitutional error (and) 10 to 15 years from now we are trying this case again,” Spencer had told ABC-7 in an interview in February of this year.

Waiting nearly four years for a trial has been taking a toll on the families of the victims. Holt’s grandmother, Cassaundra Robinson, talked about the delay with ABC-7 in February.

“It’s bad enough that they’re gone and the way they left us. But to have this thing hanging over our heads — it’s almost like we’re doing the time,” said Robinson. “It’s almost like we’re imprisoned. We are. We’re in a jail that we never put ourselves in.”