Sorted by date Results 1 - 25 of 30
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 former suburban Houston police officer was executed Tuesday for hiring two people to kill his estranged wife nearly 30 years ago amid a contentious divorce and custody battle. Robert Fratta, 65, received a lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville for the November 1994 fatal shooting of his wife, Farah. He was pronounced dead at 7:49 p.m., 24 minutes after the lethal dose of the powerful sedative pentobarbital began flowing into his arms. For about three minutes before the execution began, Fratta's 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...
HOUSTON (AP) — He was the man who sought a "kinder, and gentler nation," and the one who sternly invited Americans to read his lips — he would not raise taxes. He was the popular leader of a mighty coalition that dislodged Iraq from Kuwait, and was turned out of the presidency after a single term. Blue-blooded and genteel, he was elected in one of the nastiest campaigns in recent history. George Herbert Walker Bush was many things, including only the second American to see his son follow him into the nation's highest office. But more than anyth...
HOUSTON (AP) — George H.W. Bush, a patrician New Englander whose presidency soared with the coalition victory over Iraq in Kuwait, but then plummeted in the throes of a weak economy that led voters to turn him out of office after a single term, has died. He was 94. The World War II hero, who also presided during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the final months of the Cold War, died late Friday night at his Houston home, said family spokesman Jim McGrath. His wife of more than 70 years, Barbara Bush, died in April 2018. The son of a s...
HOUSTON (AP) — Texas' highest criminal court narrowly ruled Wednesday that a death row inmate is mentally capable enough to execute, despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that his intellectual capacity had been improperly assessed and agreement by his lawyer and prosecutors that he shouldn't qualify for the death penalty. In a 5-3 ruling with one judge not participating, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals said it reviewed the case of convicted killer Bobby James Moore under guidance from the Supreme Court's March 2017 decision and determined t...
HOUSTON (AP) — Former President George H.W. Bush was moved out of intensive care and into a regular patient room at a Houston hospital on Wednesday as he recovers from an infection that required his hospitalization a day after his wife's funeral, a family spokesman said. The nation's 41st president is expected to remain at Houston Methodist Hospital for "several more days," spokesman Jim McGrath said. Bush, who is 93, is being treated for an infection that spread to his blood. "He is alert and talking with hospital staff, family and friends, a...
HOUSTON (AP) — Former President George H.W. Bush has been hospitalized in Houston with an infection, just after attending the funeral of his wife, Barbara, a spokesman said Monday. Jim McGrath said on Twitter that the 93-year-old Bush is "responding to treatments and appears to be recovering." He was admitted Sunday morning to Houston Methodist Hospital after an infection spread to his blood, McGrath said. Barbara Bush was laid to rest Saturday in a ceremony attended by her husband and former presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, George W. Bus...
HOUSTON (AP) — In his first public comments since his wife's death, former President George H.W. Bush said Wednesday that he used to tease his spouse of 73 years that he had a complex about how much people liked her. That fact, he said, is buoyed by stories about Barbara Bush's warmth and wit following her death. Tributes have rolled in from around the world, from former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to a U.S. Navy commander, who recalled Mrs. Bush handing out cookies to sailors on a battleship. "I always knew Barbara was the most beloved wom...
HOUSTON (AP) — They met at a Christmas dance. She was 16. He was 17. Three years later they were married. The couple stayed together for 73 years, becoming the longest-married couple in presidential history. "George Bush knows how I feel," Barbara Bush had said. "He is the hero... He is my hero." Former first lady Barbara Bush died Tuesday at the age of 92. George H.W. Bush was at his wife's side when she died and had been holding her hand all day, according to Jean Becker, chief of staff at the former president's office in Houston. The c...
HOUSTON (AP) — Barbara Bush didn't hesitate to tell people that her trademark pearl necklaces were fake. Americans liked that everything else about the snowy-haired first lady was real. The wife of the nation's 41st president and mother of the 43rd brought a plainspoken, grandmotherly style to buttoned-down Washington, displaying an utter lack of vanity about her white hair and wrinkles. "What you see with me is what you get. I'm not running for president — George Bush is," she said at the 1988 Republican National Convention, where her hus...
HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday spared the life of a convicted killer shortly before the man's scheduled execution for masterminding the fatal shootings of his mother and brother. In sparing the life of Thomas "Bart" Whitaker about an hour before he was scheduled for lethal injection, Abbott accepted the state parole board's rare clemency recommendation. Whitaker's father, Kent, also was shot in the 2003 plot at the family's suburban Houston home but survived and led the effort to save his son from execution. A...
HOUSTON (AP) — Houston's mayor insists that America's fourth-largest city is "open for business," but with areas under water, people not yet in their homes, and billions in damage to repair, major disasters that Harvey created are by no means resolved. Mayor Sylvester Turner said much of the city was hoping to get back on track after Labor Day. "Anyone who was planning on a conference or a convention or a sporting event or a concert coming to this city, you can still come," he told CBS. "We can do multiple things at the same time." One w...
HOUSTON (AP) — Harvey intensified into a hurricane Thursday and steered for the Texas coast with the potential for up to 3 feet of rain, 125 mph winds and 12-foot storm surges in what could be the fiercest hurricane to hit the United States in almost a dozen years. Forecasters labeled Harvey a "life-threatening storm" that posed a "grave risk." Millions of people braced for a prolonged battering that could swamp dozens of counties more than 100 miles inland. Landfall was predicted for late Friday or early Saturday between Port O'Connor and M...
HOUSTON (AP) — A man on death row for the notorious slaying nearly 20 years ago of a black man chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged along a bumpy rural East Texas road will get his claim of innocence and poor legal representation reviewed by an appeals court. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals late Tuesday said it would review a claim from John William King that lawyers were deficient in presenting a case for innocence during his trial for what became one of the nation's most shocking hate crimes since the Civil Rights era. K...
HOUSTON (AP) — A man on death row for abducting a sheriff's deputy, keeping him handcuffed inside a patrol car trunk while demanding money from a bank and then killing the officer will serve life in prison instead after Texas' highest criminal court reduced his sentence Wednesday. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals said executing 55-year-old Pedro Solis Sosa for the 1983 slaying would carry "an unacceptable risk" that his punishment would be unconstitutionally cruel because of his intellectual disabilities. A life sentence for a 1983 c...
HOUSTON (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court refused Monday to review appeals in three Texas death row cases, including one where a man pleaded guilty to a triple slaying in South Texas. The high court's rulings moved two inmates closer to execution: LeJames Norman, 31, condemned for the 2005 shooting deaths of three people during a botched robbery of a home in Edna, about 100 miles southwest of Houston, and Bill Douglas Gates, 67, condemned for strangling a Houston woman in 1999. Neither has an execution date. Norman and an accomplice also now on d...
HOUSTON (AP) — Former President George H.W. Bush was released Monday from Houston Methodist Hospital where he received treatment for pneumonia for more than two weeks. Bush, 92, was experiencing breathing difficulties when he was admitted Jan. 14. During his treatment, which included a stay in intensive care, doctors inserted a breathing tube and connected him to a ventilator. "He is thankful for the many prayers and kind messages he received during his stay, as well as the world-class care that both his doctors and nurses provided," Bush s...
HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — Texas prison officials temporarily delayed the scheduled Thursday night execution of a man convicted of a fatal robbery at a Dallas-area sandwich shop while the U.S. Supreme Court considered multiple appeals to keep him from lethal injection. Terry Edwards remained in a small cell near the Texas death chamber. A Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman, Jason Clark, described him as apprehensive. The court order setting his punishment gave prison officials a six-hour window to carry out the execution. The order e...
HOUSTON (AP) — Doctors treating former President George H.W. Bush for pneumonia considered Thursday whether to take out a breathing tube while his wife, Barbara, said she was feeling much better after undergoing treatment for bronchitis. Family spokesman Jim McGrath said physicians for the 92-year-old Bush were evaluating him for removal of the tube, which was inserted Wednesday in a procedure to clear his airway. The 41st president has been in the intensive care unit at Houston Methodist Hospital since Wednesday, relying on a ventilator to bre...
HOUSTON (AP) — Former astronaut Gene Cernan, who as the last person to walk on the moon returned to Earth with a message of "peace and hope for all mankind," died on Monday, his family said. He was 82. Cernan was with his relatives when he died at a Houston hospital following ongoing heath issues, family spokeswoman Melissa Wren told The Associated Press. His family said his devotion to lunar exploration never waned. "Even at the age of 82, Gene was passionate about sharing his desire to see the continued human exploration of space and e...
