John Gardner was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of his wife. According to court documents John Gardner and his estranged wife were going through the process of a divorce which ended with her murder. John Gardner who had a history of violence towards women would fatally shoot Tammy Gardner. John Gardner was executed by lethal injection on January 15, 2021.
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A Texas inmate with a history of violence against women was executed Wednesday evening for fatally shooting his wife. John Gardner, 64, received a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville for the January 2005 slaying of Tammy Gardner, becoming the first inmate put to death this year in the United States.
Prosecutors said the couple was getting divorced when Gardner broke into his wife’s North Texas home and shot her in the head as she was sitting in bed. She died two days later at a hospital.
Asked by the warden if he had a final statement, Gardner, strapped to the death chamber gurney, turned his head and apologized several times to his wife’s son, daughter and mother, who watched through a window a few feet away
“I would like to say sorry for your grief,” he said. “I hope what I’m doing today will give you peace, joy, closure, whatever it takes to forgive. I am sorry. I know you cannot forgive me, but I hope one day you will.”
After telling several friends watching through an adjacent window that he loved them, he apologized again, adding that he didn’t want to talk a lot and would ask the warden to go forward with his punishment because “I want to see the Lord Jesus so bad.
Shortly after the lethal dose of the powerful sedative pentobarbital began, Gardner took three deep breaths and then began snoring. Within seconds, all movement stopped. He was pronounced dead at 6:36 p.m. CST, 16 minutes later.
Seven other executions are scheduled in the next few months in Texas, the nation’s busiest capital punishment state. Last year, 22 inmates were executed in the U.S., with nine inmates being put to death in Texas, the most of any state.
Gardner’s appellate attorneys had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, alleging his trial lawyers were ineffective, particularly for failing to present evidence Gardner suffered from “abandonment rage,” a condition Gardner claims causes men to kill their female companions with excessive force when faced with recent or imminent abandonment.
The Supreme Court denied the petition on Monday. Seth Kretzer, one of Gardner’s attorneys, said he was “deeply saddened” by the Supreme Court’s decision. No other appeals were filed by his attorneys.
“For those of us who are foot soldiers in the long war for conviction integrity, the struggle continues, the hope endures and the spirit never dies,” Kretzer said.
Prosecutors at trial described the marriage between John and Tammy Gardner as short but violent. She was Gardner’s fifth wife. The couple married in 1999.
“He was a classic abuser,” said Curtis Howard, who was one of the prosecutors for the Collin County District Attorney’s Office.
Friends and family of Tammy Gardner, 41, testified she lived in constant fear of John Gardner, who would hit and choke her and threaten her with a gun. Tammy Gardner had wanted to divorce her husband but told her boss at a wholesale horse-equipment company, “I can’t leave, he will kill me.”
In December 2004, Tammy Gardner filed for divorce after borrowing money from her company to do so.
At work, she marked February 7, 2005 on her calendar, the date her divorce would be final. She would go over to the calendar and say, “You’re almost there. You’re almost there,” according to trial testimony.
“She was on pins and needles … hypervigilant, looking out for him,” said Howard, who is now an attorney for the Plano police department.
But sometime between 11 p.m. and midnight on January 23, 2005, just 15 days before the divorce became final, John Gardner, who drove from Mississippi, broke into her home in Anna, Texas, located about 45 miles north of Dallas, and shot her in the head as she was sick in bed.
Despite being shot and unable to hear, Tammy Gardner called 911 and told a dispatcher her husband had shot her and he had left in a white pickup truck with Mississippi plates.
She was hospitalized but went into a coma and was taken off life support two days later.
In the petition before the Supreme Court, Lydia Brandt, one of Gardner’s attorneys, had argued that if evidence of abandonment rage would have been presented at trial, it would have humanized him, “thereby providing a basis for a sentence of less than death.”
Howard said the theory would not have made a difference at trial because abandonment was not related to all of his many acts of violence, which included shooting his second wife, who was pregnant at the time and later died from resulting injuries, abducting his third wife at knifepoint and savagely beating his third wife’s daughter.
Howard said in his career, he prosecuted three death penalty cases, and two of them were related to intimate partner violence.
“This is one of those tragedies that we see in Texas all too often,” he said.
Quintin Jones was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of his great aunt in 1999. According to court documents Quintin Jones would beat to death the elderly woman when she refused to give him money to support his addiction. Quintin Jones execution on May 18, 2021 was a bit odd as there was no media witnesses at the execution which is the first time that has happened in over forty years. Regardless of who was there Quintin Jones was put to death by lethal injection
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Texas inmate Quintin Jones was executed by lethal injection on Wednesday without media witnesses present.
The press could not witness the death of the 41-year-old because prison agency officials neglected to notify reporters it was time to carry out the punishment, according to the Associated Press. It was the first time in at least 40 years that media was not present at an execution.
A Texas department of criminal justice spokesman, Jeremy Desel, said he did not receive the usual phone call from the Huntsville Unit prison to bring reporters. Desel said the error “will never happen again”. Desel also said he did not know if the error was a violation of state law or a violation of agency policy.
Jones, convicted of killing his great-aunt in 1999, was executed at the state penitentiary in Huntsville at 6.40pm.
J
ones, convicted of killing his great-aunt in 1999, was executed at the state penitentiary in Huntsville at 6.40pm.
“I would like to thank all of the supporting people who helped me over the years,” he said in his last statement. “Love all my friends and all the friendships that I have made. They are like the sky. It is all part of life, like a big full plate of food for the soul. I hope I left everyone a plate of food full of happy memories, happiness and no sadness. I’m done, warden.”
Jones had made a clemency petition asking the state pardons board and governor to commute his sentence to life in prison. His plea was rejected.
Jones beat his great-aunt to death with a baseball bat she kept for her own protection. The killing was motivated by Jones’s drug addiction at the time. His other great-aunt, Bryant’s younger sister, Mattie Long, has forgiven him.
“Another Black man has been executed tonight. America’s outlook on justice remains broken, barbaric and inhuman,” said Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in a tweet. “Perhaps we need more forgiveness, more love, more understanding. I have no other words.”
The writer Suleika Jaouad also expressed her grief on Twitter. “Justice was not served. The world is not a better place because Quin is gone,” Jaouad wrote. “May his memory expand our capacity for grace and mercy.”
In his six years in office, the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, has only granted clemency once: to a white inmate, Thomas Whitaker.
Over the course of the year Texas plans to carry out five executions including that of Jones, out of a nationwide total of seven.
John Falk was sentenced to death by the State of Texas for a prison murder. According to court documents John Falk and Jerry Duane Martin, were attempting to escape when they would run over Texas Department of Criminal Justice employee Susan Canfield who was on a horse. John Falk and Jerry Martin were convicted and sentenced to death. Jerry Martin would be executed by the State of Texas in 2013.
John Ray Falk Jr. was sentenced to die for his role in the murder of a correctional officer during an attempted escape from a Huntsville-area prison more than nine years ago.
An Angelina County jury deliberated for 28 minutes this morning before reaching a decision following closing arguments. Falk, who chose to represent himself, pleaded guilty to capital murder last Thursday for the slaying of Texas Department of Criminal Justice employee Susan Canfield of New Waverly.
The jury had the option to give Falk the death penalty or sentence him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Falk and another inmate, Jerry Duane Martin, ran away from a work detail at the Wynne Unit in Huntsville on Sept. 24, 2007. Canfield was killed while trying to prevent the escape when her horse was struck by a stolen truck driven by Martin in the garage area of the city of Huntsville Service Center adjacent to the prison.
The inmates were apprehended that day a few miles from the prison.
Martin was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 2009 by a Leon County jury for Canfield’s murder. He was executed in 2013 after waiving his right to an appeal.
Frances Newton was executed by the State of Texas for the murders of her husband and children. Frances Newton would be executed by lethal injection on September 14, 2015.
Frances Newton was born on April 12, 1965
Three weeks before the murders Frances Newton would take out life insurance policies for her husband, her daughter and for herself. Newton would admit to forging her husband signature to prevent him from knowing that she had put money aside to pay for the premiums
Frances Newton would later tell police that her husband was a drug dealer and owed money to a number of suppliers.
On April 7, 1987 her husband, her seven year old son and fourteen month old daughter would be fatally shot. Frances Newton would deny having any role in the triple murders and she believed that a rival drug dealer was responsible.
Frances Newton would go on trial for the triple murder and would be found guilty and sentenced to death. Frances Newton would be executed by lethal injection on September 14, 2005
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Unless the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and Gov. Rick Perry act to stop it, on Sept. 14 Frances Newton will become only the third woman executed by the state of Texas since 1982, and the first black woman executed since the Civil War.
Unique in that historical sense, in other ways the Frances Newton case is painfully unexceptional. For there is no incontrovertible evidence against Newton, and the paltry evidence that does exist has been completely compromised. Moreover, her story is one more in a long line of Texas death row cases in which the prosecutions were sloppy or dishonest, the defenses incompetent or negligent, and the constitutional guarantee of a fair trial was honored only in name.
As Harris Co. prosecutors tell the story, the now 40-year-old Frances Newton is a cold-blooded killer who murdered her husband and two young children inside the family’s apartment outside Houston on April 7, 1987, by shooting each of them, execution-style, in order to collect life insurance. Newton had the opportunity, they argued during her 1988 trial, and a motive – a troubled relationship with her husband, Adrian, and the promise of $100,000 in insurance money from policies she’d recently taken out on his life and on the life of their 21-month-old daughter Farrah. And she had the means, they say: a .25-caliber Raven Arms pistol she had allegedly stolen from a boyfriend’s house.
To the state, it is a simple, open-and-shut case, which requires no further review. “Her case has been reviewed by every possible court,” Harris Co. Assistant District Attorney Roe Wilson told the Los Angeles Times in November. “She killed her two children and her husband. There is very, very strong evidence of that.”
Yet despite Wilson’s insistence, Newton’s case isn’t simple at all – and such “evidence” as there is, is far from strong. “The State’s theory is simple, and it is superficially compelling,” attorney David Dow, head of the Texas Innocence Network at the University of Houston Law Center, argued in Newton’s clemency petition, currently pending before the Board of Pardons and Paroles. “As we will see, however, appearances can be misleading.”
From the beginning, Frances Newton has maintained her innocence. She has also offered a plausible alternative theory of the crime – a theory that neither police, prosecutors, nor Newton’s own trial attorney, the infamous and now suspended Ronald Mock, have ever investigated. Newton and her defenders contend that Adrian, Farrah, and 7-year-old Alton were likely murdered by someone connected to a drug dealer to whom Adrian owed $1,500. The alternative theory has much to say for it – among other things, it explains the lack of physical evidence connecting Newton to the bloody murders.
Lingering questions about the physical evidence against Frances Newton prompted the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to recommend, and Gov. Rick Perry to grant, a 120-day reprieve for Newton on Dec. 1, 2004 – the day she was last scheduled for execution. Although Perry said he saw no “evidence of innocence” – legally, an oxymoron – he granted the four-month stay to allow for retesting of evidence contested by Newton’s defense, including nitrite residue on the hem of her skirt and gun ballistics evidence.
But testing on the skirt proved impossible, because the 1987 tests had destroyed the nitrite particles, and Harris Co. court officials had stored the skirt by sealing it inside a bag together with items of the victims’ bloody clothing – thereby rendering it worthless as evidence. The second round of ballistics testing, on the other hand, supposedly confirmed a match between the gun prosecutors say Newton used and the bullets that killed her family. However, that match may be fundamentally undermined – because there is no certain connection between the gun and Newton. According to Dow, it appears that police actually recovered at least two, and perhaps three, .25-caliber Raven Arms pistols during their investigation of the murders – conflicting evidence that neither the police nor the prosecutors ever revealed to Newton’s defense. Dow argues that it is virtually impossible to know whether prosecutors have been truthful in claiming that the gun that Frances Newton admits to hiding on April 7, 1987, was the murder weapon. “How many firearms were recovered and investigated in this case and who owned them?” Dow asks in a supplemental petition filed with the BPP on Aug. 25. “How many records have been withheld from Newton’s attorneys throughout this case?”
In short, there is now even more doubt about Newton’s guilt than there was when she was granted the stay – distressing Newton’s many defenders, among them Adrian’s parents, two former prison officials, and at least one of the jurors who heard Newton’s case. “We never wanted to see Frances get executed,” Adrian’s parents Tom and Virginia Louis wrote to the BPP on Aug. 25. “When the trial occurred, nobody from the [DA’s] Office ever asked … our opinion. We were willing to testify on Frances’ behalf, but Frances’ defense lawyer never approached us,” they continued. “We do not wish to suffer the loss of another family member.”
In the months before the murders, Frances and Adrian Newton were having marital problems. They were each involved in extramarital relationships, and Adrian was using drugs. In an Aug. 30 Gatesville prison interview, Newton told me that in addition to smoking marijuana, Adrian had developed a cocaine habit. “He had told me he was using cocaine, but I’d never seen that, but I saw the effects of it,” she recalled. “He was home later, he was irritable, less responsible.”
But she and Adrian had been together since she was a girl, and she was determined to work things out. That was on her mind on the afternoon of April 7, 1987, when she and Adrian sat down and talked. “We had decided that we were going to get through this together,” she said. Adrian insisted that he wasn’t using anymore, so when they were done talking and Adrian went into the living room “to watch TV … I decided to be nosy and see if he was being honest,” she recalled. Quietly, she opened the cabinet where he kept his stash.
“That’s when I found the gun,” she said. Newton said she immediately recalled a conversation she’d heard earlier that day, between Adrian and his brother, Sterling, who’d been staying with the family. “I couldn’t hear real close, but it sounded like they’d been in some trouble,” she said. “I thought I’d better take [the gun] out of there because I didn’t want it to be in the house … I didn’t want him to get into any trouble.” She removed the gun, placed it in a duffel bag and took it with her when she left the apartment around 6pm to run some errands, she says.
Newton says it was the last time she saw her family alive.
At 7pm, after a couple of errands, Frances Newton arrived at her cousin Sondra Nelms’ house, where the two chatted and decided to return to Newton’s apartment. As Newton backed out of the drive, she saw the duffel on the back seat and realized she needed to hide it. With Nelms watching, Newton retrieved the bag and walked next door into a burned and abandoned house owned by her parents, and there (as both women later confirmed), she left the bag.
The women arrived at the apartment around 8pm, and didn’t immediately realize that anything was wrong. Newton thought Adrian was napping – until she saw the blood. “As Frances walked around the couch and saw his upper torso, she immediately screamed and bolted to the children’s bedroom,” Nelms said in an affidavit. “Frances began to frantically scream uncontrollably. I could not calm her down enough to elicit the apartment’s address.”
Frances Newton says she was shocked and dazed, but gave police as much information as possible – including the fact that she’d just removed a gun from the house. She told police about Adrian’s drug habit, and that he owed some money to a dealer – which Adrian’s brother, Terrence, corroborated, telling police he knew where the dealer lived. Police never pursued the lead. “To your knowledge, was the alleged drug dealer ever interviewed by anyone in connection with this case?” Newton’s attorney asked Sheriff’s Officer Frank Pratt at trial. “No,” Pratt replied.
A bullet remained lodged in Adrian’s head, meaning that the blood and brain matter would have blown back onto the gun and shooter – confirmed by a trail of blood found in the hallway. Police found no trace of residual nitrites (gunshot residue) on Newton’s hands, nor on the long sleeves of the sweater she was wearing. They collected the clothing she’d worn that day. There was no blood, nor any trace of blood, on any of the items.
The next day, April 8, according to trial records, police supposedly confirmed that the gun they had retrieved from Newton’s duffel bag in the abandoned building – at her direction –matched the murder bullets. Yet Newton was not arrested until more than two weeks later. Newton says that Harris Co. Sheriff’s Sgt. J.J. Freeze told her that police had actually recovered two guns; in a sworn affidavit, Newton’s father Bee Henry Nelms says Freeze told him the same thing and added that Newton would “eventually be released.” Nonetheless, Newton was arrested two weeks later – after she filed a claim on Adrian and Farrah’s life insurance policies – and charged with the capital murder of her 21-month-old daughter.
The state’s primary evidence against her was elementary: Newton had filed for insurance benefits, and the Department of Public Safety forensic technicians had detected nitrite traces near the hem of Newton’s long skirt – although they couldn’t say with certainty that the nitrites were not her father’s garden fertilizer transferred earlier that day from the hands of her toddler daughter. For physical evidence, the state relied primarily on the supposed ballistics match to the gun Frances Newton had hidden.
Yet in court Freeze was somewhat vague: “I believe we talked about two pistols,” he testified. “I know of one for sure, and there was mention of a second one that Ms. Newton had purchased earlier.”
There are serious questions about the prosecutors’ timeline, which would have required Newton somehow to murder her family, clean herself of any and all blood traces and gunshot residue, and drive to her cousin’s house – all in less than 30 minutes. And since her 1988 conviction, the question of a second gun has haunted Newton’s case. The ballistics evidence was increasingly suspect in any case because of the recent history of the Houston PD crime lab, which has been repeatedly charged with incompetent, shoddy work, resulting in a number of exonerations and the wholesale discrediting of the lab, which remains under investigation. The lab’s clouded reputation was one factor that prompted Gov. Perry to accept the BPP’s recommendation to grant Newton a reprieve last winter.
Although subsequent testing supposedly confirmed the ballistics match, the search for the second gun continued. And in June, Dow argued in Newton’s clemency petition, the truth finally began to leak out, and from the most unlikely place: the Harris Co. District Attorney’s Office. During a brief videotaped interview with a Dutch reporter, Assistant DA Roe Wilson inadvertently confirmed the existence of a second gun. “Police recovered a gun from the apartment that belonged to the husband,” Wilson acknowledged. “[It] had not been fired, it had not been involved in the offense, ” she continued. “It was simply a gun [Adrian] had there; so there is no second-gun theory.”
Wilson and her boss, DA Chuck Rosenthal, quickly retracted her admission. Wilson told the Houston Chronicle that she’d simply “misspoken,” and Rosenthal accused Dow of fabricating the idea of a second gun “out of whole cloth.” “I’m very clear,” Rosenthal told The New York Times. “One gun was recovered in the case.” On Aug. 24, the Court of Criminal Appeals agreed, dismissing Newton’s most recent appeal. “The evidence in this case was more than sufficient to establish [Newton’s] guilt,” Judge Cathy Cochran wrote. “The various details that [Newton] suggests her trial counsel should have investigated in greater detail do not detract … from the single crucial piece of evidence that concerns her: she disposed of the murder weapon immediately after the killing.”
Dow and his University of Houston law students persisted, and late last month may have succeeded. In August, Harris Co. investigators provided testimony that police may have recovered at least two identical .25-caliber Raven Arms pistols. In separate affidavits, two police investigators recall tracing firearms recovered in connection with the murders. Officer Frank Pratt told one of Dow’s students that he was assigned a gun found in the abandoned house, which he traced to a purchase by Newton’s boyfriend’s cousin at a local Montgomery Ward. He also discovered, he told student Frances Zeon, that the purchaser had also bought a “second, identical gun”; but he didn’t follow up on the second gun, because “he felt there was no need to do so.” Pratt said he’d written up a report on the gun – a report Newton’s attorneys have never seen.
However, Newton’s attorneys do have a police report written by Detective M. Parinello, who reported he had traced yet another firearm recovered in connection with the case to a purchase from Rebel Distributors in Humble, Texas, which he said also ended up with Newton’s boyfriend. “The question arises: what recovered firearm was … Pratt investigating?” asks the clemency petition. “Counsel does not have access to the Harris Co. Sheriff’s Department’s records in this case. A request made directly to that institution for all records in connection to its investigation of this offense was rejected.”
From all this conflicting yet incomplete gun evidence, it seems reasonable to surmise that there is no way to know which gun was in fact the murder weapon, or which gun was delivered for ballistics tests in 1987 or this year. Since the prosecution relied so heavily on a weapon that Frances Newton herself had delivered to them, the new evidence discovered by her attorneys completely undermines her conviction.
At press time, Harris Co. Sheriff’s Office spokesman Lt. John Martin was not able to reach Parinello or Pratt for comment but said that a captain who worked the Frances Newton case had said there was only one gun recovered during the investigation. Harris Co. DA Chuck Rosenthal reiterated that, “as far as I know” there was only one gun recovered in the case. However, he said that even if investigators had recovered multiple firearms, and even if each were the same brand and caliber, the fact remains that the weapon investigators recovered from the abandoned house, which was immediately “tagged” and “tested,” matched the bullets recovered from the victims. “Let’s say, for conjecture’s sake, that you ran down 50 or 100 guns, all associated with the case,” he said. “The fact [is] that only one fired the bullets and that we know where that gun came from.”
As in many Texas capital cases, a large part of the problem with Newton’s appeals is that her court-appointed trial attorney, Ron Mock, never actually investigated her case. If he had, perhaps he would’ve followed up the drug dealer lead or Freeze’s reported comments about a second gun. Newton and her parents implored the trial judge to allow her to change attorneys, and Mock admitted to the judge that he hadn’t talked to any prosecution witnesses, nor had he subpoenaed any defense witness. The judge granted the motion to remove Mock but he declined a continuance, leaving Newton little choice but to go to trial with Mock. “It was stunning,” she told me. “[Mock gets on the stand and] says, ‘I don’t know anything,’ and for the judge to just dismiss it … it was stunning.” (Mock has since been brought before the State Bar’s disciplinary board at least five times on various charges of professional misconduct, for which he has been fined and sometimes suspended; he is currently suspended from practicing law until late 2007.)
The Harris Co. prosecutors’ defense of the conviction has also worn thin, especially given Roe Wilson’s supposed “misstatement” about the second gun. To Newton’s mother, Jewel Nelms, Wilson’s admission is no mistake. “I’ve known all the time that there was a second gun,” she told Houston’s KPFT radio last month. “So I want to say again, to Roe Wilson, I thank you … very much for letting us know, indeed, that there’s somebody down there that knows about the second gun and was willing to talk about it – even though I know it wasn’t her intention to do it.”
Kimberly McCarthy was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of her elderly neighbor. Kimberly McCarthy would be executed by lethal injection on June 26, 2013 she was the 500th prisoner to be executed by the State of Texas by this method.
Kimberly McCarthy was born on May 11, 1961 in Greenville Texas. She was married for a short time and had one son. Kimberly McCarthy would work as a occupational therapist for a time until a crack addiction took over her life. McCarthy would spend time in prison for an assortment of charges including prostitution and theft
On July 21, 1997 Kimberly McCarthy would phone her elderly neighbor to ask to borrow some sugar. When McCarthy arrived at the home she would stab the victim multiple times, beat her with a candle holder and cut off a finger to steal a diamond ring. McCarthy would steal the victims car and a variety of objects from the home. McCarthy would be arrested the next day and charged with capital murder.
Kimberly McCarthy lawyers would put up a defense that their client was being set up and was not guilty of the brutal murder. However the jury felt differently and convicted her and sentenced her to death.
Kimberly McCarthy would be executed by lethal injection on June 26, 2013
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Kimberly McCarthy on Wednesday evening became the 500th prisoner executed in Texas since 1976, when the death penalty was reinstated in the state, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
McCarthy was pronounced deadat 7:37 p.m. ET at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas, said department spokesman John Hurt.
The 52-year-old former occupational therapist was convicted in 1997 of murdering her 71-year-old neighbor, Dorothy Booth, a retired college professor.
Booth was found beaten and stabbed to death, and one of her fingers was severed, indicating a ring was forcibly removed, the Department of Criminal Justice said.
Evidence later showed McCarthy had pawned the stolen diamond ring the day of the crime. When she was arrested, McCarthy was found with Booth’s credit cards and a large knife stained with her neighbor’s blood, the department said.
In her last statement, McCarthy thanked her supporters, including her ex-husband, attorney and spiritual adviser.
“Thank you everybody. This is not a loss, this is a win. You know where I am going. I am going home to be with Jesus. Keep the faith. I love y’all,” McCarthy said, according to Jason Clark, another department spokesman.
Outside the prison, nicknamed the “Walls Unit,” a small crowd of demonstrators gathered Wednesday afternoon to protest the execution. They held signs that read, “Don’t kill for me” and “End executions in Texas.”
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Monday denied McCarthy’s appeal of her sentence and declined on Tuesday to reconsider it, saying her claims should have been raised previously, CNN affiliate KPRC reported.
Texas has led the nation in the number of executions since 1976, but the number of states carrying out capital punishment continues to drop.
Last year, Texas executed more people than it sentenced to death for the eighth straight year.
Four states – Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Arizona – accounted for three quarters of all U.S. executions in 2012.
The most-prolific death penalty state in the US executed its 500th inmate on Wednesday as protesters gathered outside the penitentiary walls to rally against a grim landmark in America’s capital punishment history.
About 70 people waited outside the prison in central Huntsville, Texas, where Kimberly McCarthy was put to death by lethal injection. After the scheduled execution time of 6pm local time (1am Thursday BST), some chanted “murderers!” as a dozen guards stood behind yellow tape and blocked the road leading to the execution chamber.
Kimberly McCarthy, 52, was declared dead at 6.37pm. In her final statement, she said: “This is not a loss. This is a win. You know where I’m going. I’m going home to Jesus. I love you all … God is great,” Associated Press reported.
Prison officials administered a single dose of pentobarbital, a barbiturate.
Typically about 10 people gather in Huntsville to protest against each execution. Peter Johnson, 68, stood holding a sign bearing the slogan “Execute justice not people”. He said he had travelled from Dallas, three hours away, and this was the fourth or fifth time he had come to express his disgust in front of the red-brick walls of the Huntsville unit.
“Not only is it a tragedy for this particular person, it’s a disgrace for our nation and our state,” he said. “I feel the way the death penalty is dispensed in the state of Texas is tied to the colour of the killer and the colour of the victim.”
Critics of the death penalty have long argued that it disproportionately affects poor people and ethnic minorities. Black people make up 12% of the state’s population, but nearly 40% of the 281 inmates on death row.
McCarthy’s lawyer, Maurie Levin, had filed a last-ditch appeal alleging that her client’s state-appointed legal representation at trial was inadequate and that the composition of the Dallas County jury was unfair because the prosecution used peremptory strikes to remove prospective non-white jurors, with the result that all but one of the 13-person jury was white.
But on Tuesday the Texas court of criminal appeals refused to hear the appeal for the second time in two days. McCarthy’s execution had already been stayed twice this year, once only hours before she was due to die.
Since it resumed capital punishment in 1982, Texas has executed more prisoners than the next six states combined. Virginia, the second-most prolific state, has put to death 110 people. With its 26 million people Texas is the second-largest state in the US by population.
Some outside the prison held posters declaring “Wanted – Serial Killer, Gov. Rick Perry.” Like his predecessor, George W. Bush, the Texas governor is a firm believer in capital punishment. In 2011 he said he lost no sleep over the possibility that his state had executed an innocent person.
His spokesman told the Guardian last year that Perry had introduced reforms allowing for greater use of DNA testing, imposing minimum qualifications for court-appointed defence lawyers and making it easier for prosecutors to seek life without parole for offenders. Perry has presided over 261 executions, more than any other governor in modern US history, but the rate of executions has declined from a high of 40 in 2000, Bush’s last year.
In 2012, Texas executed 15 prisoners. Kimberly McCarthy is the eighth inmate given a lethal injection in Texas this year. Another seven executions are scheduled between now and January, including two next month.
Kimberly McCarthy was a former care-home therapist and a cocaine addict. According to court records, she entered the home of her white neighbour, Dorothy Booth, on the pretext of wanting to borrow some sugar. McCarthy then stabbed the retired 71-year-old five times, beat her, cut off a finger to steal her diamond ring and fled with her purse. She was found guilty and sentenced to death in 2002, five years after the murder in a Dallas suburb.
Kimberly McCarthy is the first woman executed in the US since 2010 and only the 13th since capital punishment was reinstated in the US in 1976. The US has executed 1,338 people since then, the Death Penalty Information Center says.
Polls suggest most Americans still support capital punishment. McCarthy’s was the second US execution this week. Brian Davis was put to death for the rape and murder of his girlfriend’s mother in Oklahoma on Tuesday after Governor Mary Fallin rejected a recommendation from the state’s parole board that the sentence be reduced to life without parole, reports said.
Kimberly McCarthy was executed for the murder of an elderly woman
When Was Kimberly McCarthy Executed
Kimberly McCarthy was executed on June 26, 2013
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