CHRISTINA LeANN NEAL - 12 yo (2000) - Dobbin (NW of Houston) TX

Texas is set to send a convicted child murderer to the execution chamber for a crime
committed in Montgomery County a decade ago.
Barring a successful last-minute appeal, Jonathan Green will be executed on Wednesday.
Green was found guilty of abducting, raping and
strangling a 12-year-old girl in June 2000. Those working to save him
insist he is borderline mentally retarded and also suffers from
schizophrenia. They claim his mental illness has become so severe that
he is not competent to be executed.
"There have been signs of mental illness since he's been on death row," said appellate attorney James
Rytting, who will present evidence to halt the execution at a court
hearing today in Conroe. "He hears voices, and he has shoved wads of
toilet paper in his ear to stop them."
Mental health experts for the defense and prosecution have differing opinions on Green's competence.
Prosecutors also point to a recent letter Green sent to Mongomery DA
Brett Ligon outlining his complaints about his trial and the case
against him as evidence of his rational state. The law requires that an
inmate have a rational understanding of why he is being executed in
order for it to take place. The question of whether Green does is the
lone remaining legal issue, Rytting said. Mental illness per se is not a bar to execution.

Mother:'He needs to die'

Green was convicted in the death of Christina LeAnn Neal, who disappeared while walking home
in the rural community of Dobbin on June 21, 2000. A onetime star
running back for Montgomery High School, Green was accused of grabbing
the girl shortly after she left a friend's house that was about 100
yards away from his residence.
Authorities looking into the disappearance learned that
Green had burned a pile of trash on his property after the girl's
abduction. When investigators began to probe the area around the burned
trash, Green ordered them off his property.
They returned shortly with a search
warrant, saw a freshly dug hole near the old trash pile and began a
thorough search of the premises. Neal's body was found in a gray blanket
stuffed into a laundry bag behind a chair in his home.
"Justice needs to be served and he needs to die," said Laurie Neal, Christina's mother. "He
knew what he was doing. He went across the highway and grabbed
Christina. She wasn't more than 200 yards from home. For somebody to do
all that — to grab her, bury her behind his house, then burn trash on
top of it and almost get away with the perfect murder - that's not a
crazy person."
Neal described her slain daughter as a typical 12-year-old, a "sweet child"
who would never hurt anyone.
"She liked the simple things," her mother said. "She liked
playing basketball, she liked horses and animals, she liked cooking with
me on holidays. We just had a memorial service for her. It's been 10
long years since she died. It was just like somebody ripped our heart
out. Our family is not complete. It will never be complete."

DNA tied a loner to the abduction, rape and strangulation of a
12-year-old girl whose charred remains were eventually discovered hidden
behind furniture in his dilapidated shack near Houston. Jonathan
Green, 42, was set to be executed Wednesday for the June 2000 murder of
Christina LeAnn Neal. Neal was reported missing after she failed
to return home from a friend's home the evening of June 21. Police
questioned Green that month after his wallet was found in woods near
clothing and jewelry that had belonged to the missing girl from
Mongomery County. But they but did not arrest him. It wasn't
until a month later, when a neighbor reported an unusually large trash
fire at the laborer's rural home where he lived alone, that police
discovered what looked like a shallow grave on the property about 50
miles northwest of Houston. A police cadaver dog pulled detectives
inside the house where Neal's remains were found wrapped in a blanket
and stuffed into a blue laundry bag and wedged into a corner behind
furniture. "It was pretty gruesome," recalled Mike Griffin, a
former Montgomery County district attorney who prosecuted Green. "He
tried to burn her. That didn't work, he buried her and then panicked and
put her under the couch." DNA recovered from her body tied Green
to her slaying. A carpet fiber detected on the girl's panties found in
the woods was tied to a carpet at Green's home. Green had been a
football star at nearby Montgomery High School in the 1980s but an
injury scuttled his athletic future, according to a pastor who testified
at Green's 2002 trial. Gerald Crow, one of Green's trial
lawyers, said his defense team tried to show there was insufficient
evidence to prove the capital murder charge and that someone else had
killed Neal and framed Green. The jury disagreed and convicted him. At
his punishment hearing, two women testified that Green had raped them. A
neighbor testified that Green had asked to buy her daughter's pony but
was told it was not for sale. The animal disappeared a few days later,
then was found dead behind Green's home, stabbed in the chest. A bloody
pair of pruning shears was found nearby and carried Green's fingerprint,
but he said they had been stolen and that he wasn't responsible for the
animal's killing. Evidence also showed that Green assaulted a
fellow jail inmate and an officer while awaiting trial. Attorneys
for Green argued that he should be spared because he was too mentally
ill to be executed. Green declined to speak to reporters as his
execution neared. Green will be the 14th inmate executed this
year in Texas, the nation's most active death penalty state, and the
first of two Texas prisoners set to die on consecutive evenings this
week. Michael Perry, 28, from Montgomery County, is set to die
Thursday. Perry was convicted in the October 2001 slaying of
Sandra Stotler, 50, who was fatally shot during a burglary at her home
near Lake Conroe. Perry also was a suspect but never charged in the
slayings of Stotler's 16-year-old son, Adam, and an 18-year-old friend,
Jeremy Richardson. At least three other Texas death row inmates
have execution dates in the coming months.