Criminal Justice
A new trial ultimately is being sought for Armstrong, 24, who was found guilty of killing his parents in 2016 and sentenced to life in prison. The Harris County District Attorney’s Office informed Armstrong last month that his case “may be associated” with a forensic analyst who was terminated for faulty work.
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An attorney for Antonio "A.J." Armstrong Jr., the Houston man convicted of shooting his parents to death when he was a teenager in 2016, is asking for a hearing to be held to determine whether his capital murder conviction was influenced by the work of a DNA analyst who was fired for incompetence.
A new trial ultimately is being sought for Armstrong, 24, who was found guilty by a Harris County jury last August and sentenced to life in prison after two previous trials ended with hung juries.
The Harris County District Attorney's Office, in a notice filed in court last month, informed Armstrong that his case "may be associated" with Rochelle Austen, who was hired by the Houston Forensic Science Center in 2019 and terminated this March because of an "inability to produce quality work" as well as a "lack of attention to detail."
In response, Armstrong attorney Patrick McCann asked Texas' Fourteenth Court of Criminal Appeals this week to abate his standing appeal and send the matter back to the 178th District Court for a hearing about Austen's role in the case and whether a new trial is warranted. McCann wrote in his Tuesday filing that information about Austen "would have been critical to decisions made by the defense team" during the trial last summer.
"However, they never knew about this evidence or the analyst's lack of core competence which resulted in her removal," McCann wrote. "This matter was clearly under investigation prior to the disclosure date. What is critical to the interests of justice are the following: When could this information (have) been disclosed? Was it deliberately withheld until after the trial?
"As this court cannot act as a fact finder," McCann added, "it is imperative that someone should in order to preserve Mr. Armstrong's right to a fair trail and due course of law."
The Harris County District Attorney's Office declined to comment.
Armstrong was 16 at the time his parents, Dawn and Antonio Armstrong Sr., were shot to death as they slept in the family's Bellaire-area townhome during the early hours of July 29, 2016. The younger Armstrong was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of shooting them in the head with his father's .22-caliber pistol, with the possibility of parole in 40 years.
McCann, in a motion for a new trial that was filed about a month after Armstrong's conviction, questioned the credibility of an expert witness for the prosecution who presented damning new evidence that was not part of the first two trials. Crime scene investigator Celestina Rossi, the subject of a 2019 complaint alleging she planted fabricated DNA evidence in another murder trial, testified in the latest Armstrong trial that specks of his father's blood were found under the adhesive name tag placed on Armstrong's clothing when he was brought to the Houston Police Department for questioning in the aftermath of his parents' murders.
The motion for a fourth trial was not granted by the district court Judge Kelli Johnson.
McCann wrote in his motion this week that defense attorneys could have used information about Austen and her work to support their theory of cross-contaminated DNA samples and also in an attempt to discredit Rossi's testimony.
In its notice about Austen, the Harris County District Attorney's Office cited two examples of her "lack of attention to detail." It was discovered in April 2023 that male DNA samples had been switched at some point during her testing of the samples, the DA's office wrote, and there was another instance in March of this year when Austen did not follow chain-of-custody protocols and "processed the wrong sample."
"Your criminal case was identified as a case that may be associated with this person," the DA's office wrote in its April 23 notice to Armstrong.
While the jury was deliberating in the most recent trial, Armstrong filed a federal lawsuit against the City of Houston, claiming the Houston Police Department planted the DNA evidence about which Rossi testified. The lawsuit was dismissed in December, court records show.
