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Thomas Barefoot Texas Execution

Thomas Barefoot was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of a police officer. According to court documents Thomas Barefoot was being placed under arrest for the rape of a three year old girl when he shot and killed a police officer. Thomas Barefoot would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death. Thomas Barefoot would be executed by lethal injection on October 30, 1984

Thomas Barefoot More News

Convicted copkiller Thomas Barefoot dodged four dates with the executioner in Texas, but lost his last hope for a reprieve Monday, while the death stay request of Earnest Knighton was also rejected a final time by Louisiana’s governor and the courts.

Both men were scheduled to be executed shortly after midnight.

Texas Gov. Mark White late Monday refused to halt Barefoot’s death by injection, and a series of state and federal courts rejected last-ditch efforts to block Knighton’s execution.

The state Supreme Court in Louisiana late Monday voted 6-0 in refusing to stop Knighton’s scheduled death by electrocution. U.S. District Judge Tom Stagg in Shreveport, La., the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans and the U.S. Supreme Court also refused to intervene.

Earlier in the day, the Supreme Court voted 7-2 to reject an appeal seeking to halt Barefoot’s execution and review his conviction and sentence.

Meanwhile, North Carolina attorneys for Margie Velma Barfield, a convicted poisoner, filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court to stop her Friday execution. The 52-year-old grandmother, who admitted killing her mother and three others, would become the nation’s first woman executed in 22 years

Thomas Barefoot, 39, an oilfield roughneck who said God promised to spare him, spent Monday in his cell, visiting with relatives and friends, a prison spokesman in Huntsville, Texas, said.

‘If God tells me it’s not going to rain and I go get an umbrella, then it’s going to rain,’ Barefoot said.

Knighton, 38, faces ‘Gruesome Gerdie,’ nickname for Louisiana’s battered electric chair in Angola, La.

Knighton’s attorneys twice urged Gov. Edwin Edwards to stay his execution, claiming Knighton was drug crazed when he killed RalphShell of Bossier City, La., and took $300 from his service station.

Thomas Barefoot was convicted in the 1978 shooting death of Harker Heights police officer Carl LeVin.

He won two stays of execution in 1983 and one each in 1980 and 1981. His case was selected by the Supreme Court last year to test how to handle last-minute appeals to the federal courts.

‘It’s worse whenever I really think it’s going to happen,’ LeVin’s widow said. ‘I thought he was going to be executed in January ’83. I’m at a fever pitch now. When it doesn’t (happen), it hurts. It really hurts.’

LeVin was shot once in the head while investigating a case of arson. The .25-caliber pistol used in the slaying was found in Barefoot’s pocket when he was arrested

Barefoot’s attorneys argued psychiatric testimony used in the punishment phase was gotten illegally and important information was suppressed.

They also wanted Texas officials to halt executions until the Supreme Court rules on whether execution by injection is legal.

Twenty-six people have been executed since the Supreme Court removed the ban on the death penalty eight years ago

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1984/10/29/Convicted-copkiller-Thomas-Andy-Barefoot-dodged-four-dates-with/1288467874000/

Charlie Brooks Texas Execution

Charlie Brooks was executed by the State of Texas for kidnapping, robbery and murder. According to court documents Charlie Brooks would test drive a vehicle at a car lot, the employee who went with him on the ride would be kidnapped, brought to a hotel where he was shot and killed. Charlie Brooks would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death. Charlie Brooks would be the first inmate who would be executed by lethal injection on December 7, 1982

Charlie Brooks More News

When Charles Brooks Jr. lay down on a gurney in the execution chamber, there was no way to know exactly what would happen next.

On this day in 1982, Brooks was the first person to be executed by injecting a cocktail of drugs intended to numb his body and mind, paralyze him and stop his heart. His death, the first by lethal injection, sparked an ethics debate among the public and physicians about whether the procedure is humane, one that continues today

Charlie Brooks was convicted of murdering David Gregory, an auto mechanic, wrote Dick Reavis for Texas Monthly in early 1983. Gregory rode with Brooks during a test drive at the used-car lot where he worked. That night, he was found tied up in a motel room. He had been shot in the head. In separate trials, both Brooks and partner in crime Woodie Loudres were sentenced to die for the crime. Loudres was able to reduce his sentence, but Brooks was not, although no weapon was ever found and officials never determined who shot Gregory.

Lethal injection was seen to be more humane than other execution methods, like gas, electrocution or hanging, according to an article on History.com. Because one of the drugs used was supposed to put the condemned in a state of deep sedation, it was also perceived to be painless. In spite of physician protests that lethal injection was a violation of medical ethics, wrote Robert Reinhold of The New York Times, it was seen as acceptable. But conflicting witness reports at Brooks’s death led Reinhold to report that “the procedure did not seem to settle the question of whether such a death was painless.”

The conviction that landed Charlie Brooks on death row wasn’t his first. What was different this time: he knew that if the state didn’t intervene in his case, he could become the first man on death row to be killed by a cocktail of drugs designed to numb his mind and stop his heart. “In his best mood,” Reavis wrote: “Charlie thought that there was nothing to fear in death by injection. He believed that he could set it up to be like the surgery after the first of his bullet woundings.”

Brooks and Reavis made an agreement: if the condemned man felt pain during his execution, he would shake his head, like he was saying “no,” and Reavis would understand. They repeated the agreement at each meeting

In the end, the state didn’t grant Charlie Brooks a stay of execution. “For the first time in American penal history,” Reavis wrote, “men who were neither physicians nor sorcerers got ready to execute a prisoner with the forbidden tools of medicine and pharmacology,”

“According to four reporters who witnessed the execution in a tiny room at the edge of the prison’s Walls unit, Mr. Brooks appeared to have suffered some pain,” Reinhold wrote.

Today, those killed by lethal injection are almost as likely to be guinea pigs for the procedure as Brooks was. Supplies of known lethal-injection cocktails are running out across the United States, reports Tess Owen for Vice. Injections nationwide are at a 25-year low, she writes, partially because it’s increasingly hard for corrections departments to get the drugs they need to perform them. This deficit has led to correctional departments trying untested mixes of drugs to replace the old standards they aren’t able to get anymore, with grim results. Only Texas, Georgia and Missouri are using the death penalty “with any regularity,” writes Mike Brantley for AL.com. But the death penalty remains legal, and those who face the prospect of death at state hands may potentially be killed using untried cocktails of drugs.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/thirty-four-years-ago-first-person-died-lethal-injection-it-was-controversial-then-too-180961343/

Preston Hughes Texas Execution

Preston Hughes was executed by the State of Texas for a double murder. According to court documents Preston Hughes would stab to death LaShandra Charles, 15, and her cousin Marcell Taylor, 3. According to police reports she told the officer that Preston attempted to rape her before she died. Preston Hughes was arrested, convicted and sentenced to death. Preston Hughes would be executed by lethal injection on November 15 2012

Preston Hughes More News

Preston Hughes III, who was convicted in the fatal stabbings of two Houston youths in 1988, was executed Thursday at 7:52 p.m. after the U.S. Supreme Court and a federal district court rejected his last-minute appeals. Hughes was the second Texas inmate executed in two days, following the execution of Ramon Hernandez on Wednesday, and is the last scheduled this year.

Hughes was convicted in 1989 of fatally stabbing LaShandra Charles, 15, and her cousin Marcell Taylor, 3, in a field behind a Fuddruckers restaurant in Houston. A police sergeant reported that Charles identified the name “Preston” and said, “He tried to rape me,” shortly before she died.

As Hughes’ execution date neared, lawyer Patrick McCann filed a clemency petition to the Board of Pardons and Paroles, which makes recommendations to Gov. Rick Perry on whether to spare a death row inmate at the last minute. In the petition, McCann pointed to new evidence he found that indicated Hughes had been molested by an uncle.

McCann said that Hughes’ jury never heard that evidence, and it might have affected their decision about whether Hughes deserved execution. “They came out of that trial thinking Preston was a monster, not a tragically twisted boy, tortured by memories of sadistic abuse at the hands of an older figure of trust,” McCann wrote to the parole board. “No court of appeals has ever before seen this evidence.

An ongoing debate between lawyers as the execution neared concerned the actions of the detectives investigating the crime back in 1989.

After hearing the victim say Hughes’ first name, Houston police Sgt. Don Hamilton and other detectives located him in a nearby apartment complex and found blood on his clothing and a knife in his apartment. Hughes confessed to the murder during the investigation. During his trial, however, he denied involvement. No biological evidence tied him directly to the crime. He said the blood on the knife came from a rabbit he had killed months before. At Hughes’ trial, Hamilton said he continued to ask Charles questions, but could not understand many of the answers. “I could not understand it,” Hamilton told the jury. “It was more of a mumble.”

After reviewing autopsy reports, Tarrant County’s deputy medical examiner Robert White concluded that Charles would have died within 60 seconds of the stabbing. The officers claimed to hear her speak nearly 15 minutes later. “Even with instant extensive medical attention she would have been unconscious in a matter of seconds,” White wrote in a sworn affidavit that accompanied the clemency petition. “It is simply not medically feasible that this young woman … could have spoken to the officers.”

“The officers had to have flat out lied,” McCann said.

Assistant Attorney General Fredericka Sargent contended that McCann’s accusations were “wholly without merit.”

“Dr. White makes broad assumptions about how long Shandra could have been conscious after being stabbed, but he was not there,” she wrote in a brief to the Supreme Court. “Whatever Dr. White says now, nearly twenty-five years after the fact, does nothing to call into question the integrity of those first officers on the scene.”

During the course of the last year, McCann’s work has been doubted fervently by Hughes’ advocates, including blogger John Allen, who believe that Hughes never committed the crimes and that McCann failed to raise claims of innocence. “We’ve done everything we can to get McCann to defend him, and we failed,” Allen said. “I ceased communication with him.”

McCann responded by explaining that Texas and federal law set such a high burden of proof for new claims of “actual innocence” that he would never have succeeded in such efforts. But he could not comment on why he did not agree with Allen regarding Hughes’ innocence. “I find myself in an odd position,” he said, “because I’m ethically bound not to advance a claim I think is false.”

Hughes himself sought to have McCann replaced. “I’ve been trying to get rid of him for years,” he said recently from death row in Livingston. “I’ve asked him several times to withdraw from representing me. He’s ignored my request.” In September, Mr. Hughes filed a petition to have Mr. McCann replaced, and a court rejected it.

On Oct. 26, McCann attempted to sue the Texas Department of Criminal Justice over its lethal injection protocols in civil court. In July, the department switched to single-drug executions. McCann says that they did so without any oversight and that this infringed on Hughes’ rights. “If the head of TDCJ wanted to he could bring back hanging,” McCann said.

State District Judge R.K. Sandill told McCann that he would not be permitted to represent Hughes in civil court without his client’s signature. The Court of Criminal Appeals, Texas’ highest criminal court, ordered Sandill not to stay Mr. Hughes’ execution.

On Monday, Allen filed a motion for DNA testing in state district court, asking the court to order testing of a vaginal swab that prosecutors at trial argued included Hughes’ DNA. On Thursday, the motion was denied.

Activist Ward Larkin, who has worked closely with Allen, attempted to file a second, different clemency petition with the Board of Pardons and Paroles. The board rejected the petition, and Larkin sued the board. A federal civil court refused to rule on the matter, saying it did not have jurisdiction.

Before he was executed, Hughes thanked Allen and others for their work on his case and maintained that he did not commit the murder, according to officials at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. “Please continue to fight for my innocence,” he said, “even though I’m gone.”

https://www.texastribune.org/2012/11/15/preston-hughes-executed-1988-murderpreston-hughes-/

Ramon Torres Hernandez Texas Execution

Ramon Torres Hernandez was executed by the State of Texas for the kidnapping, sexual assault and murder of a woman. According to court documents Ramon Torres Hernandez, who was a convicted sex offender, was driving with Santos Minjarez and Abel Abdygapparova when he saw the victim Rosa Maria Rosado standing at a bus stop. The plan was to steal the woman’s purse however Rosado fought back and was dragged inside of the vehicle. The woman was brought to a motel room where she was sexually assaulted and murdered.

Ramon Torres Hernandez was later linked to the sexual assaults and murders of two young teenagers. Ramon Torres Hernandez and Santos Minjarez were convicted and sentenced to death. Abel Abdygapparova was sentenced to life in prison. Santos Minjarez would die on death row in 2012. Ramon Torres Hernandez was executed by lethal injection on November 14, 2012.

Ramon Torres Hernandez More News

Sex offender Ramon Torres Hernandez is headed for execution for the rape, robbery and slaying of a 37-year-old San Antonio woman 11 years ago.

Hernandez was one of three people convicted in the murder of Rosa Maria Rosado. She was grabbed and thrown into a car driven by Hernandez when she wouldn’t release her purse during a drive-by robbery at a San Antonio bus stop.

The U.S. Supreme Court last month refused to review his case, and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles refused the 39-year-old Hernandez’s a clemency request earlier this week.

His execution Wednesday evening in Huntsville would be the 14th this year in Texas. Another inmate, Preston Hughes, is to die Thursday for a double murder in Houston in 1988.

https://www.beaumontenterprise.com/news/article/Execution-set-for-6-p-m-today-will-be-14th-this-4036448.php

Mario Swain Texas Execution

Mario Swain was executed by the State of Texas for the kidnapping and murder of a woman. According to court documents Mario Swain would break into the womans home, kidnap her and drive to a remote location where she was beaten and stabbed. Mario Swain would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death. Mario Swain would be executed by lethal injection on November 8 2012.

Mario Swain More News

A man who was sentenced to die in the fatal beating, stabbing and strangling of an East Texas call center supervisor more than a decade ago, displayed a pattern of obsession and violence that a former district attorney said indicated the potential of a serial killer.

Mario Swain has since filed two unsuccessful appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to review his case. Swain, 33, is scheduled for execution Thursday.

Worried friends alerted police when Lola Nixon didn’t show up for dinner two nights after Christmas in 2002. Officers discovered signs of forced entry at her home near Dallas – and blood throughout – but no sign of the 46-year-old woman. Neighbors said they had seen a truck parked outside the night she went missing, and police traced that vehicle to a man who said his grandson, Swain, had borrowed it.

Swain gave several confessions, and said his friends had beaten Nixon while burgling her home. But those friends all had credible alibis.

Eventually he led detectives to Nixon’s body, in the backseat of an abandoned vehicle at a remote site in Gregg County. She had been beaten with a tire iron, stabbed and strangled.

“Unless you knew where you were going, you wouldn’t get there,” Lance Larison, a prosecutor at Swain’s 2004 trial, said.

Evidence indicates Nixon fiercely resisted the attack and that Swain left her bleeding in her bathtub before throwing her in the back of her BMW and driving her to the site where she was found. He then returned to her house and tried to clean up.

The tire iron was recovered from a trash container where Swain said he had thrown it. Prosecutors said Swain used Nixon’s credit cards and that he gave a piece of her jewelry to a friend.

Nixon’s blood was found on Swain’s clothing in the truck, along with her car keys and garage door opener

At trial, prosecutors presented evidence and witnesses that showed a pattern of crimes: Swain gathered information about women he wanted to rob, then attacked them, forcing them to inhale the anesthetic halothane and hitting them over the head with a wrench or shooting them with a stun gun.

“Not only did he stalk, he started making physical assaults,” Larison said.

“Girlfriends told us he loved to watch detective shows, crime science shows, that he was fascinated by them,” he said. “He would keep lists of women’s cars and certain license plates.”

He was “a serial killer in training,” the prosecutor said

Earlier this year, a federal appeals court rejected Swain’s appeal that argued his confessions to the slaying should not have been allowed at trial, that his lawyers were deficient and that there was a problem in jury selection. The U.S. Supreme Court three weeks ago refused to review Swain’s case. And last week the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refused an appeal challenging an investigator’s trial testimony.

Nixon was unmarried and lived alone. She had been a supervisor at a telephone call center in Longview where Swain once worked.

Swain declined from death row to speak with reporters as his execution date neared.

His lethal injection would be the 13th this year in Texas, where two more executions are set for next week.

https://www.beaumontenterprise.com/news/article/Man-set-to-die-in-2002-slaying-of-East-Texas-woman-4016872.php