USA - Texas. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed the execution of Bernardo Tercero

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals today stayed the execution of Bernardo Tercero after a prosecution witness in his 2000 trial said he had testified falsely. Tercero, 39, was convicted in the March 1997 murder of Robert Berger during a robbery of a Houston dry cleaning shop. In an affidavit submitted to the court by Tercero's Austin attorney Walter Long, witness Sylvia Cotera said that she falsely testified that Tercero told her that he had shot his victim because the man had no money. "He never talked to me about the amount of money he robbed nor that he was angry because the man did not have very much money," she said in the statement. "What I said about these things in my testimony wasn't the truth." Cotera, who has an8th-grade education and speaks no English, also recanted her testimony that Tercero had shot Berger because the man's 3-year-old daughter, present at the time of the crime, had seen him. In her trial testimony, Cotera told jurors she had not gone to the police because Tercero threatened to burn her apartment while it was occupied by her 3 young children. In reality, she said in her affidavit, Tercero threatened to burn her apartment because she could not send him money, a comment she took as a joke. In a 2000 statement to a trial investigator, Cotera said she testified as she did because she feared the law. In the recent petition filed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Long said he had no evidence that prosecutors were aware Cotera's trial testimony was false. The appeals court issued its Tuesday stay so that the case's trial court could consider the merits of the new appeal.