Suzanne Basso was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of a mentally disabled man. Suzanne Basso would be executed by lethal injection on February 5, 2014
Suzanne Basso was born May 15, 1954 in New York State. Her maiden name was Suzanne Burns
Suzanne Basso was married in the early 1970’s to a former Marine who would later be arrested for molesting their daughter
Suzanne Basso would move and be romantically involved with a man named Carmen Basso. Suzanne who did not divorce her first husband would take his last name. Carmen would die in 1997 from natural causes.
Suzanne would meet Buddy Musso who was living in an assisted living home and the two would start a long distance relationship. Soon after Buddy would move to Houston to be with Basso.
Suzanne along with her son James O’Malley, Bernice Ahrens Miller and her children, Craig and Hope Ahrens, and Hope’s fiancé, Terence Singleton all lived in the residence when Buddy Musso moved in. Reports indicate from the moment he moved in he was treated like a slave and abused by the people in the home. Two weeks after his arrival Buddy Musso would be brutally tortured and murdered.
Suzanne Basso would be convicted and sentenced to death. As the alleged ringleader she received the most severe sentence. Suzanne Basso would be executed by lethal injection on February 5, 2014
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Suzanne Basso became the fourteenth woman to be executed in the US in the modern era after a last-minute appeal to the Supreme Court failed on Wednesday.
The 59-year-old former seamstress was put to death by lethal injection at the Texas state penitentiary in Huntsville, near Houston.
She is the 510th person to be executed in Texas, the nation’s most-active death penalty state, since America restored the death penalty in 1976. Of those, 505 were men.
Basso was the first female inmate executed in the US since Kimberly McCarthy was put to death in Texas last June. Only four women have been executed nationwide since 2002 – three in Texas, which accounts for more than a third of the total number of prisoners executed in the US.
Basso declined to make a final statement and was pronounced dead at 6.26pm local time, eleven minutes after the lethal dose of pentobarbital was administered, Associated Press reported.
Basso’s lawyer, Winston Cochran, asked the Supreme Court to review Texas’s criteria for assessing the mental health of prisoners sentenced to death.
In earlier appeals to state and federal courts, Cochran argued that Basso was delusional and did not meet the standard of mental competency required for an execution to proceed.
However, last month a judge in Houston ruled that Basso was competent enough to be executed. Cochran also contended that she had not received a fair trial. He said that no mitigating evidence was presented, the testimony of a medical examiner was questionable and no testimony or evidence showed that she personally killed Musso or proves exactly how he died.
Originally from New York, Basso was found guilty of the 1998 murder of 59-year-old Louis “Buddy” Musso.
According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, she lured the mentally-disabled man from New Jersey to Texas under the pretence that she would marry him. But she the ringleader of a group who tortured and killed him by kicking and beating him with belts, baseball bats and steel-toed boots. He was found by a road in a Houston suburb with extensive injuries.
Basso’s five co-defendants, including her son, were convicted of involvement in Musso’s killing but not sentenced to death. At the trial in 1999 it was suggested that Basso hoped to cash in on his life insurance payout.
Women account for about 10% of murder arrests but only represent 2.1% of death sentences imposed at trial and less than 1% of completed executions, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
There are now eight women on Texas’ death row, including Linda Carty, a British citizen born on the Caribbean island of St Kitts.
Lisa Coleman was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of a nine year old boy. Lisa Coleman was executed by lethal injection on September 17, 2014.
Lisa Coleman was born in 1975 in Texas her family life was horrid where she was abused by her uncle and sent to live in a foster home. Unfortunately the foster home was no better as she was sexually assault by her foster parents.
By the time she was in her teens Lisa had been stabbed by a cousin and given drugs and alcohol by family members. At the age of sixteen Coleman had given birth to a child and had been to prison twice for selling drugs and burglary.
Lisa partner Marcella Williams would give birth to Davontae in 1995 who was born with developmental disabilities. Marcella would lose custody of her children briefly when Child Protective Services believed they were being abused by Lisa Coleman. Somehow the children would later be returned to the home after Marcella agreed that Coleman would have no contact with the children.
In 2002 CPS were again notified that the children were being abused, however when CPS arrived at the home the children denied being abused. It should be noted at this time Lisa Coleman and Marcella Williams were hiding Davontae from authorities and stopped sending the child to school.
In 2004 Marcella Williams would call 911 and report that Davontae was not breathing. When the ambulance arrived at the home they would find the nine year old child who weighed less than 40 pounds. Lisa Coleman would tell authorities that Davontae had just stopped breathing however doctors would later report that this was not true and the child died hours before the 911 call was made. Doctors would also found a score of old injuries and evidence that Davontae had been bound at his wrists and ankles.
Lisa Coleman and Marcella Williams were arrested and charged with the murder of Davontae Williams. The official cause of death was listed as malnutrition. Marcella Williams took a plea deal and Lisa Coleman would go to trial where she was convicted and sentenced to death.
Lisa Coleman would be executed on September 17, 2014 by lethal injection
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Texas death row inmate Lisa Ann Coleman was executed Wednesday night, the sixth woman put to death since the death penalty was reinstated in Texas.
Coleman, 38, was convicted and sentenced to death for the 2004 starvation death of her girlfriend’s son, Davontae Marcel Williams.
Before the lethal drug pentobarbital was injected into her inside the execution chamber at the state’s Huntsville Unit, Coleman expressed love for her family and thanked her lawyers.
“I just want to tell my family I love them, my son, I love him,” Coleman said, according to a statement released by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. “God is good … I’m done.”
She died 12 minutes after the drug was administered. Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Robert Hurst said Coleman’s time of death was 6:24 p.m.
Coleman was the 517th person to be executed in the state since 1982, the year Texas reinstated the death penalty following a 1976 Supreme Court decision that allowed states to resume capital punishment. She is the ninth person executed in Texas this year.
She was living with her girlfriend, Marcella Williams, in an Arlington apartment complex when paramedics discovered the starved corpse of a 9-year-old boy on July 26, 2004. He had been beaten, bore 250 scars and weighed 35 pounds at the time of his death, about half the typical weight for a child his age.
At the time of his death, Davontae was suffering from pneumonia. His cause of death was malnutrition with pneumonia as a contributing factor, according to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office.
Both Coleman and the boy’s mother were charged with capital murder. But Williams pleaded guilty in 2006 to avoid facing the death penalty at trial. Child Protective Services records showed Williams and her son had been the subject of at least six child abuse investigations.
Coleman’s attorney, John Stickels of Arlington, appealed her death sentence based on how his client was initially charged.
In Texas, there has to be an underlying felony or second crime committed for a defendant to be charged with capital murder. Before 2011, those underlying crimes were murder, kidnapping, burglary, robbery, obstruction or terroristic threat. But in 2011, lawmakers added the killing of a child under the age of 10 to those underlying crimes.
In the Davontae Williams case, prosecutors used kidnapping as the underlying crime. Prosecutors presented evidence that Davontae had been locked in a pantry and kept from leaving his own home.
But Stickels says there was no kidnapping, at least not according to Texas law. His appeal to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans based on that claim was rejected late Tuesday, and the U.S. Supreme Court chose not to intervene.
“It is wrong, it is child abuse, but it’s not kidnapping,” Stickels said. “I’m not saying she’s innocent and did not do something wrong. But it’s just not kidnapping.”
At Coleman’s 2006 trial, it was revealed that the two women bound Davontae’s wrists and sometimes locked him in a pantry. Stickels said that even though the law defines kidnapping as placing someone in an area with the intention of hiding them, it is not kidnapping if a parent places a child in a room to punish him.
“Lisa is absolutely innocent of capital murder,” Stickels insisted. “And if they execute her, they will be executing someone who is innocent of capital murder.”
Reports from those prior CPS investigations detailed how Davontae was found to be hungry. In 1999, he and his sister, Destinee, were placed into foster care after Davontae was found to have been beaten with an extension cord. Coleman denied beating him with a cord, and Williams told CPS that they had bound him with one. Davontae, born four months premature, had developmental disabilities, according to a clinical psychologist who examined the boy after he was placed in foster care.
The two children were eventually returned when Williams promised to stay away from Coleman.
In 2004, Davontae’s case was part of a state review of 1,103 child abuse cases in North Texas that was ordered by Gov. Rick Perry. The state’s Health and Human Services Commission Office of Inspector General found that CPS caseworkers failed 70 percent of the time to act quickly to protect a child in danger.
“It appears that CPS Region 3 [Dallas/Fort Worth] was performing at a minimum standard and often below standards,” Brian Flood, the commission’s inspector general at the time, said in his report to the governor. “When abuse or neglect was indicated in the file, only 30 percent of the time did CPS caseworkers implement the appropriate safety steps for the short term protection of the child.
Betty Lou Beets was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of one of her husbands. Betty Lou Beets would be executed by lethal injection on February 24, 2000.
Betty Lou Beets was born in North Carolina on March 12, 1937. According to Betty Lou she was sexually abused by her father. Beets who was deaf due to a childhood bout with measles. When she was twelve years old her mother was institutionalized and she had to raise her younger siblings
Betty Lou would marry her first husband when she was fifteen years old and would last for seventeen years. Betty Lou who was no angel would rack up a series of arrests for public lewdness. Betty Lou would marry her second husband twice, the first would end after she shot him twice in the back of the head (he would survive and testify against her at the murder trial) and she was later acquitted of attempted murder charges. The same husband would remarry Beets but they would divorce again a month later.
Betty Lou Beets would marry her third husband and soon after attempted to run him over with a car. Her fourth husband would only last a year before he disappeared.
Betty Lou Beets would marry her fifth husband in 1981, two years later Jimmy Don Beets would be reported missing. Betty Lou son told the jury that she told him to leave the house and when he returned two hours later Jimmy Don Beets would be lying dead from two gunshot wounds. Betty Lou and her son would bury the body in the front yard before reporting her husband missing. Beets and her son also spilled some of her husband’s heart medication in his boat and set it adrift. Police believed that Jimmy Don Beets had drowned.
Betty Lou Beets would be arrested two years later. The police would find the body of Jimmy Don Beets buried in the front yard. Police would also find the body of her fifth husband in a well on the propert.
Betty Lou Beets would be convicted for the murder of Jimmy Don Beets and sentenced to death. She attempted to blame the murders on two of her children however the jury did not buy it.
Betty Lou Beets would be executed by the State of Texas by lethal injection on February 24, 2000.
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BETTY LOU BEETS, a 62-year-old woman convicted of the 1983 murder of her husband, was killed by lethal injection just after 6 p.m. CST at a state prison in Huntsville, Texas. The state leads the country in executions, with 208 since resuming capital punishment in 1982. Two United Nations experts on human rights had appealed to Governor Bush in a letter Thursday to spare her from execution, saying that the domestic “abuse and extreme violence” she suffered was not made known to the jury that sentenced her to die. A federal appeals court on Thursday upheld a lower court ruling rejecting her attorneys’ plea that her case be reexamined because she was a battered wife. Beets is the fourth woman executed in the United States since the 1976 Supreme Court ruling allowing capital punishment. She is the second woman and the oldest person to be put to death in Texas since the state resumed executions.
The state of Texas executed Betty Lou Beets, a 62-year-old great grandmother, Thursday evening at Huntsville prison. Beets was the second woman to be put to death in Texas in the last two years—Karla Faye Tucker was executed in February 1998—and the fourth woman to die in the US since executions resumed in 1976.
Earlier in the day Beets’ attorney Joe Margulies told CNN, “She’s very scared. She doesn’t want to be strapped down to that gurney all alone.” Beets declined a last meal and gave no final statement as she lay strapped to the death chamber gurney. After she was injected with the lethal drugs she smiled at her attorney and pastor, coughed twice and gasped before being pronounced dead at 6:18 PM Central Standard Time.
Beets was convicted in 1985 of fatally shooting her fifth husband. Police found his body buried in the front yard of the couple’s trailer home near the small East Texas town of Gun Barrel City. She was also convicted of shooting and wounding her second husband and was charged with—but never tried for—killing her fourth husband. Prosecutors dubbed her the “Black Widow of Henderson County” and claimed she killed her last husband to collect insurance money.
The case attracted national and international attention because of revelations—never presented by her original trial lawyer—that Beets had suffered physical, sexual and emotional abuse both as a child and at the hands of her husbands. Her current attorneys argued that because she had inadequate defense counsel at her 1985 trial, the jury was never able to consider mitigating circumstances during the sentencing phase.
The attorneys also charged that the state parole board violated Beets’ civil rights by denying her the review process that the state legislature mandates for all murder cases involving battered women.
About 100 protesters, some holding photographs of a bruised Beets following a beating, gathered outside the prison before the execution. Death penalty opponents, domestic violence awareness organizations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and even officials from the UN Human Rights Commission had appealed to Texas Governor George W. Bush to commute the elderly woman’s sentence. According to the governor’s office, Bush received more than 2,100 calls and letters from people opposing the execution, while only 57 messages came from those endorsing it.
On Tuesday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected Beets’ pleas for a 180-day reprieve and commutation of her sentence. On Thursday afternoon a federal appeals court in New Orleans denied a motion to stop the execution. In Austin, US District Judge James Nowlin dismissed the motion, saying it was “yet another example of a prisoner attempting to delay execution just prior to the execution date.”
Finally, about an hour before the execution, the US Supreme Court, without comment, refused to hear Beets’ case. Minutes later Texas Governor George W. Bush gave the go-ahead for the execution by turning down an appeal for a 30-day delay. The governor issued a cursory four-sentence statement.
“After careful review of the evidence in the case I concur with the jury that Betty Lou Beets is guilty of this murder,” Bush said. “I am confident that the courts, both state and federal, have thoroughly reviewed all the issues raised by the defendant. The courts, including the US Supreme Court, have rejected all of her appeals. I concur with the recommendation of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and will not grant a 30-day delay.”
Notwithstanding Bush’s claims to the contrary, Beets hardly received a fair trial and due process. Under Texas law, she could not be sentenced to death unless the state proved that she murdered her husband with premeditation, i.e., to recover a $100,000 pension and insurance policy. But her attorney, E. Ray Andrews, deliberately withheld from the jury the fact that she did not know about the insurance policy until a year-and-a-half after her husband’s murder, when Andrews himself told her about it.
This information would have seriously undermined the prosecution’s claim that Beets’ had killed for money. But to be a witness and provide testimony, he would have had to withdraw as her defense lawyer and give up his fee. His price for representing Beets was her signature on a contract surrendering all movie and book rights to her story.
“He said he was going to get rich on all this, and the case was going to be the biggest thing that ever happened to him,” Bob Miller, commander of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars post, told Beets’ appellate lawyers in a 1991 affidavit. “He said the case was going to turn into a big movie, and he had all the rights to it. It was something that he talked about pretty often.” Miller also said Andrews regularly drank heavily at the post prior to going into court to argue the case.
After becoming district attorney, Andrews was arrested by the FBI in 1994 for soliciting a $300,000 payoff to drop a death penalty case against a businessmen accused of killing his wife. He resigned from the prosecutor’s office, gave up his law license, and cried at his sentencing, saying he was a longtime alcoholic, prescription drug abuser and heavy gambler. He was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in federal prison.
Neither was the jury told that Beets had suffered years of abuse, beginning when she was a child in the 1940s. She grew up poor in a small Texas town, battling an alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother. Beets was sexually abused as early as age five and later suffered organic brain damage in a car accident. She first married at the age of 15, was beaten by many of her husbands and became an alcoholic.
In 1991, a federal court judge held that Beets’ defense attorney’s behavior violated her right to effective counsel and ordered a new trial. But the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated her conviction and death sentence, saying Beets could not show that either Andrews’ testimony or evidence of spousal abuse would have changed the trial’s outcome.
“All my momma’s life, she’s been abused,” her daughter Faye Lane said at a news conference earlier in the week. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes. And I know that if the jury heard the truth about my momma, she only could have done something like this if she’d been very scared or threatened.”
Shortly before her execution, Beets told the Athens Daily Review, “This is not a capital case, it’s about domestic violence…You don’t kill the one that survives it.”
The execution of Betty Lou Beets is a particularly gruesome example of the brutality and vindictiveness of the death penalty. But it is by no means the exception. The vast majority of the 3,600 inmates on death row come from impoverished and abused backgrounds and lack the resources for an adequate defense. They confront prosecutors, judges and politicians who want to further their careers by promoting the death penalty and appealing to the most backward and reactionary sentiments in the population.
Since becoming governor in 1995 George W. Bush, who is running for president as a “compassionate conservative,” has overseen 121 executions, more than any other governor in US history. The state parole board, which is dominated by Bush appointees, has only granted commutations to two death row prisoners. Rejections of appeals are so commonplace, the parole board rarely meets and instead votes on clemency appeals by fax. Overall, Texas is responsible for 208 of the 616 executions carried out in the US since 1976.
Support for the practice of state murder is by no means limited to the Republican Party. Just last week, President Clinton rejected calls for a moratorium on federal executions.
Advocacy of the death penalty is considered by the media and the political establishment to be a prerequisite for anyone seeking high national office. Even as evidence of wrongful convictions of death row prisoners generates growing public concern about capital punishment, reflected even in some official circles—as evidenced by a moratorium on executions by the Republican governor of Illinois—all of the current presidential candidates of both parties reaffirm their commitment to this barbaric practice. They make a point of aligning themselves with the law-and-order elements that hold sway in both big business parties.
Karla Faye Tucker was executed by the State of Texas for the murders of two men. On February 3, 1998 she was executed by way of lethal injection.
Karla Faye Tucker was born in Houston Texas on November 18, 1959 to parents in a volatile relationship. When Karla was ten years old she would learn that her father was not her father during her parents divorce proceedings.
Karla Faye Tucker was using drugs by the time she was twelve years old and would soon travel with her mother who was a groupie to a number of rock bands and would also work as a prostitute.
At the age of sixteen Karla Faye Tucker would be briefly married to an auto mechanic.
When Karla Faye Tucker was in her early twenties she would meet a man named Daniel Ryan Garrett who she would soon be in a relationship with. The two who spent a lot of time using drugs were short on cash and decided to rob someone they knew of his motorcycle
During the robbery they would grab the homeowner, Jerry Dean, and force him into the bedroom. Jerry Dean who made a grab for Karla Faye Tucker was beaten with a ball peen hammer. Tucker who was armed with a pick axe would strike Dean repeated with the tool causing his death.
When Garrett left the room to load more parts Karla Faye Tucker noticed a woman, Deborah Ruth Thornton, in the room and would strike her with the pick axe. The two women began to fight until they were separated by Garrett. Tucker would strike the woman repeatedly with the pick axe. Karla Faye Tucker would later tell people she has multiple orgasms when she killed the woman.
Karla Faye Tucker and Danny Garrett would be arrested five weeks later.
Karla Faye Tucker was initially charged with both murders however after agreeing to testify against Danny Garrett the murder charge for the Jerry Dean case was the only one she stood trial for. Danny Garrett would also only be charged with the Deborah Thornton murder. Both would be convicted and sentenced to death.
Karla Faye Tucker would be executed on February 3, 1998 by lethal injection. There was a ton of controversy around her execution for she completely changed her life while imprisoned and spent most of her time helping others. Most believed her death sentence should have been commuted.
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Karla Faye Tucker, the Pickax Killer turned born-again Christian, died of a lethal injection tonight, closing a long fight for her life as a crowd outside the Texas death house prayed for her soul.
Tucker, 38, was pronounced dead at 6:45 p.m. local time, becoming the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War and only the second in the United States since the resumption of the death penalty in 1976. Although she and her attorneys had played down her gender in their many pleas for clemency, the fact that she was a woman helped arouse international interest in her cause and generate appeals for mercy from figures including Pope John Paul II and religious broadcaster Pat Robertson.
Wearing a white prison uniform and white tennis shoes, Karla Faye Tucker lay strapped on her back on a gurney as she delivered her final statements to the gathered witnesses, who included her husband, Dana Brown, a prison ministry worker she married by proxy in 1995, and Ronald Carlson, a Houston machinist and brother of one of the victims.
“I love all of you very much,” she said to the witnesses. “I am going to be face-to-face with Jesus now.”
Addressing her husband, she said, “Baby, I love you.”
Then a lethal dose of sodium thiopental began dripping into the veins of each arm, along with pancuronium bromide, which is a muscle relaxant, and potassium chloride, which stops the heartbeat. Within a few minutes, she was dead. Officials with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said that Tucker also could have requested a sedative but did not.
“I never saw Karla Faye Tucker take the smile off her face,” said Vicente Arenas, a Houston television reporter who was among the witnesses.
The scene was emotional outside the Department of Criminal Justice facility here called the death house in this east Texas town of 35,000 about 60 miles north of Houston, where a record 37 men were executed last year. Several hundred people on both sides of the issue crowded against yellow police lines, some still arguing over the value of the death penalty, others praying and singing “Amazing Grace” and other hymns.
“Bye bye, Karla Faye,” read one sign. “Forget Injection, Use a Pickax,” read another.
But many others here were sympathetic to Tucker’s plight: “I’m Ashamed to be a Texan,” one sign read, and another said: “Jesus Loves Karla Faye and So Do I.”
Cheers went up from the pro-execution crowd when her death was announced.
The case had divided victims’ families. Carlson, brother of Deborah Thornton, one of the two people Tucker was convicted of helping to kill, participated in rallies at the state Capitol in Austin asking that Tucker be spared. Richard Thornton, the victim’s husband, argued that he was sick of the depiction of Tucker as “Miss Saint.”
Arenas said Thornton, who is in a wheelchair with severe diabetes and was a witness to the execution, muttered throughout the proceedings. “The world’s a better place,” he was heard to say during the execution.
It had become increasingly clear on Monday that despite Tucker’s efforts to show she was a changed person, notably in televised appearances on “60 Minutes,” Robertson’s “The 700 Club” and CNN, her quest to spare her life had failed. The state Board of Pardons and Paroles, which could have commuted her sentence to life in prison, voted 16 to 0, with two members abstaining, to deny her request. Tucker, who could have been eligible for parole in 2003 had the board agreed, had asked that she be given life in prison without the possibility of release, but there is no such sentence in Texas, and board members said they could not make a special case of Karla Faye Tucker.
After the board’s ruling, Tucker’s only hope was with the U.S. Supreme Court, which turned down two appeals without comment this afternoon, and Gov. George W. Bush (R), who, under the law, could grant her only one 30-day stay. But here in Texas, the national leader in executions with one in every three that occurs, governors have seldom intervened in death-penalty cases and Bush was no exception.
“May God bless Karla Faye Tucker and may God bless her victims and their families,” Bush said after declining to grant the stay.
No one disputed the fact that Karla Faye Tucker committed a nightmarish act. According to her own account, she began using heroin at age 10 and was a drug-addled prostitute when she and a friend, Daniel Garrett, entered the Houston apartment of Jerry Lynn Dean on June 13, 1983, to steal a motorcycle.
Garrett began beating Dean with a hammer, and Tucker, who said she was disturbed by the “gurgling” sounds the wounded man made, found a 3-foot-long pickax and began hacking at his body. Then she noticed a figure cowering under a pile of blankets and swung the pickax again, striking Deborah Thornton on the shoulder. She said that Garrett finished Thornton off; the pickax was found embedded in the woman’s chest.
Karla Faye Tucker, who testified against Garrett, was not tried for Thornton’s murder but received the death penalty for Dean’s slaying. Garrett, who was also sentenced to death, died of a liver ailment in prison in 1993.
But Karla Faye Tucker said that as she waited in the Harris County Jail for her trial, her head began to clear from the years of drugs, and meeting with jail ministry workers, she found religion and the peace that sustained her for more than 14 years on death row.
In her final days, an unusual assortment of people rallied to her cause, including the pope and Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and host of “The 700 Club,” who normally supports the death penalty. “The 700 Club” broadcast Tucker’s final interview today, in which she discussed what she might be thinking as she lay waiting on the gurney.
“I am going to be thinking certainly about what it’s like in heaven,” she said. “I’m going to be thinking about my family and my friends and the pain. I am going to be thankful for all the love.”
Repeatedly, in the weeks leading to her death, Karla Faye Tucker had told interviewers she was not afraid of dying. “I know that Jesus has prepared a place for me,” she said in a recent CNN report. “I know if I have to go February 3, he’s going to come and he’s going to escort me personally. I believe that.”
After the execution, Tucker’s body was taken to Huntsville Funeral Home, said prisons spokesman Larry Todd, where her husband was expected to claim it for burial.
Robert Pruett would be involved in his first murder when he was just fifteen years old that would send him to prison for ninety nine years. Just a few years later he would be involved in yet another murder that would send him to Texas death row and ultimately to his execution. In this article on My Crime Library we are going to take a closer look at Robert Pruett.
Robert Pruett Childhood
Robert Pruett grew up in a poor neighborhood in Texas where he would have to take food from garbage containers to eat. His father was in and out of prison for the majority of his childhood and when he was home he would physically and sexually abuse his children. Robert Pruett would talk about taking bathes behind stores using a garden hose. Drug abuse ran rampant through the home and by and early age Pruett was abusing drugs.
Robert Pruett First Murder
When Robert Pruett was just fifteen years old he was involved in an argument with his neighbor Ray Yarborough. Later that night Robert, his brother Howard Pruett jr and his father Howard Pruett Sr would confront Ray Yarborough that ended with Howard Sr stabbing the victim several times causing his death.
Even though Howard Pruett Sr would tell authorities his sons had nothing to do with the murder both of them would be charged. Howard Pruett Jr would be sentenced to forty years in prison, Howard Pruett Sr would be sentenced to life without parole and fifteen year old Robert Pruett would be sentenced to ninety nine years in prison. The two younger Pruett’s would be convicted under the Texas law of parties where even though they did not convict the murder they were still guilty because they were there.
Robert Pruett would be sent to an adult prison at the age of seventeen years old
Robert Pruett Prison Murder
In 1999 Texas Correctional Officer Daniel Nagle was found dead in his office. The cause of death was a heart attack that was induced after he was stabbed eight times with a homemade weapon.
Robert Pruett became a suspect as he had a run in with Daniel Nagle earlier in the day regarding taking food from the mess hall. That conduct report had been torn up and left at the murder scene.
A number of inmates would testify that they would saw Robert Pruett murder the officer however there was no physical evidence tying Pruett to the murder. Robert Pruett would be convicted and sentenced to death
Robert Pruett Texas Death Row
Robert Pruett was sentenced to death in 2002 and would spend the next fifteen years declaring that he was innocent and was set up as the fall guy.
Robert would point to Daniel Nagle reputation and that a number of fellow guards had issues with him as he was in the process of filing a grievance against corrupt officials in the Texas Department Of Criminal Justice.
Robert Pruett would avoid execution in 2015 when a judge ordered DNA testing on the metal rod used to kill Daniel Nagle. The DNA test came back inconclusive and a mysterious DNA of an unknown female was found on the weapon. The Texas courts refused to order more testings.
Robert Pruett Execution
Robert Pruett would be executed by the State of Texas on October 12, 2017 by lethal injection. Robert Pruett would give the final statement:
“I’ve hurt a lot of people, and a lot of people have hurt me … One day, there won’t be a need to hurt people,”
Robert Pruett was 38 years old. At the time of his execution he had spent over twenty three years in prison.
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Robert Pruett was executed in Huntsville Thursday night, completing the death sentence he received more than 15 years ago in the 1999 murder of prison guard Daniel Nagle.
Nagle was 37 when he was repeatedly stabbed with a makeshift knife in a Beeville prison. His body was found in a pool of blood next to a torn-up disciplinary report he had written against Pruett.
Pruett, 20 at the time, had already been in prison for years, convicted as an accomplice and sentenced to 99 years in a murder his father committed when he was 15. Prosecutors argued Pruett killed Nagle because of the report, but Pruett consistently and adamantly insisted on his innocence.He argued he was framed by corrupt guards and inmates about whom Nagle was writing a “lengthy grievance,” according to a recent court filing.
In his last words, Pruett expressed his love for the friends who witnessed his execution.
“I’ve hurt a lot of people, and a lot of people have hurt me … One day, there won’t be a need to hurt people,” 38-year-old Pruett said in his final statement, strapped to a gurney in Texas’ death chamber.
His last appeals were denied by the U.S. Supreme Court within an hour of his scheduled execution, and at 6:17 p.m. he was injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital. He was pronounced dead 29 minutes later after chanting and shouting obscenities, the Associated Press reported. Several of Pruett’s friends, as well as the wife and in-laws of Nagle, were expected to attend the execution. Family of Ray Yarbrough, the man Pruett’s father killed, were also listed as witnesses.
Nagle’s sister, Nora Oyler, issued a statement through the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, saying she and other family members still miss Daniel every day.
“The execution will in no way minimize our loss,” she said. “We have chosen to spend this time together and away from the coverage so that we can celebrate Daniel’s life and not the tragedy of his death.”
Pruett’s 2002 conviction in Nagle’s murder was primarily based on eyewitness testimony from inmates, which his lawyers have argued is unreliable. He fought for years to test crime scene evidence for DNA in an attempt to prove his innocence. Courts twice ordered testing on clothes, the report and the weapon, but results were ruled inconclusive. In April, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals said the results would not have affected his conviction, setting the path for a new execution date.
Jack Choate, executive director of the Special Prosecution Unit, which prosecutes crimes in Texas prisons, said that after all of the court reviews, he didn’t see “room” for an innocence claim, mentioning how Pruett admitted on cross-examination he had asked an inmate to testify that he had cut his hand the day of the murder. Pruett’s blood on a prison shirt, he testified, was because of an injury he got lifting weights.
“I think when people look at the whole picture … you can see what the jury saw and review that, and it makes for a very compelling case against Mr. Pruett,” Choate told The Texas Tribune on Monday.
But Pruett’s lawyers fought his execution until the last hour. In his final appeal, he sued in federal court, claiming recent refusals by the trial court and prosecution to proceed with further DNA testing violated his due process rights.
The DNA evidence that was tested and deemed inconclusive by Texas’ high appellate court needs more examination, Pruett argued in court filings, because a partial female profile had been found on the murder weapon in its latest examination. He argued further testing could identify a culprit, but the state argued the weapon was likely contaminated by people on the defense team and journalists who have handled it without gloves since the trial.
“The prosecution and the state courts have stood in the way of identifying the actual murderer,”wrote Pruett’s attorney, David Dow, in his filing.
Three levels of federal courts denied this request, with the U.S. Supreme Court issuing its denial around 5:15 p.m.
While Pruett awaited his execution, the prison guard community remembered Nagle. Nagle was the Beeville president of Texas’ prison guard union, and he uttered his last public words when he went to Austin the same month of his murder to speak of dangerous understaffing in prisons, saying somebody was going to have to die before the state realized it had a problem, according to Lance Lowry, president of the union’s Huntsville chapter.
Lowry said the ratio of prisoners to guards is still dangerously low today, and it was one of the causes of Nagle’s death.
“He died alone … he was killed in a room full of inmates,” he said. “Unfortunately, I expect to see more Daniel Nagles in the future here, and that scares me.”
Robert Pruett was executed in 2017 by lethal injection in Texas
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