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HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — A last-ditch effort to stop Texas from executing an autistic man in a shaken baby case stretched into the final hours Thursday night as one judge granted an extraordinary maneuver by lawmakers to delay the lethal injection while the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for it to proceed. The judge granted a Texas House committee's request for a temporary restraining order to delay the execution of Robert Roberson so the condemned man could testify next week about his case at a hearing by lawmakers. Roberson was s...
HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — A Texas man convicted of fatally beating his 83-year-old great aunt more than two decades ago was executed Wednesday evening without media witnesses present because prison agency officials neglected to notify reporters it was time to carry out the punishment. Quintin Jones received the lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville for the September 1999 killing of Berthena Bryant, agency spokesman Jeremy Desel said about 30 minutes after Jones was pronounced dead. Desel never received the usual phone call f...
HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — A Texas inmate who claimed he was intellectually disabled was executed Wednesday for fatally stabbing his two stepsons during a 2007 attack in which his wife also died. Robert Sparks received a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville for the slayings of 9-year-old Harold Sublet and 10-year-old Raekwon Agnew in their Dallas home. Sparks, 45, became the 16th inmate put to death this year in the U.S. and the seventh in Texas. "I am sorry for the hard times. And what hurts me is that I hurt y'all ... e...
HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — An avowed racist who orchestrated one of the most gruesome hate crimes in U.S. history was executed Wednesday in Texas for the dragging death of a black man. John William King, who was white, received lethal injection for the slaying nearly 21 years ago of James Byrd Jr., who was chained to the back of a truck and dragged for nearly 3 miles (5 kilometers) along a secluded road in the piney woods outside Jasper, Texas. The 49-year-old Byrd was alive for at least 2 miles (3 kilometers) before his body was ripped to p...
HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — A member of the "Texas 7" gang of escaped prisoners won a reprieve Thursday night from execution for the fatal shooting of a suburban Dallas police officer after claiming his religious freedom would be violated if his spiritual adviser wasn't allowed to be in the death chamber with him. The U.S. Supreme Court blocked Patrick Murphy's execution about two hours after he could have been executed. Murphy's attorneys had said that Texas prison officials' efforts to prevent the inmate's spiritual adviser, a Buddhist p...
HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — Chaos erupted outside Texas' death chamber when the son of the condemned inmate pounded on the chamber windows, shouted obscenities and threw fists after his father spoke his final words. Billie Wayne Coble, a Vietnam War veteran who killed his estranged wife's parents and brother and threatened to do the same to her in 1989, told five witnesses that he selected to attend his Thursday night execution that he loved them. Coble then nodded as they watched from a witness room, saying: "Take care." When he finished s...
