HUNTSVILLE — Convicted killer Robert Jean Hudson was executed Thursday night for fatally stabbing his ex-girlfriend after he beat down the door and barged into her Dallas-area apartment nearly a decade ago.
Hudson repeatedly expressed love to his wife and a friend who watched through a window and ignored four relatives of his victim as they watched through another window into the death chamber.
"I will take you to heaven with me," Hudson said from the death chamber gurney. "I will always be with you."
"Now pray with this young man down here and we'll go," he said, nodding to the chaplain who stood at his feet. Hudson then prayed the Lord's Prayer and concluded by again expressing love. "I am yours and we are one. Let's go warden," he said.
Eight minutes after the lethal drugs began to flow, he was pronounced dead at 6:24 p.m. CST.
Hudson, 45, was the 18th Texas inmate put to death this year in the nation's busiest capital punishment state.
Edith Kendrick, 35, was killed and her 8-year-old son seriously wounded in the 1999 attack in Mesquite, just east of Dallas.
The nine-member high court, with Chief Justice John Roberts not participating, refused the appeal Thursday from Hudson. Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg would have granted a reprieve.
Attorneys for Hudson didn't question the three-time parolee was responsible for the slaying but faulted his trial lawyers for not presenting to a jury mitigating evidence "that this was a crime of passion, and significantly reduced Mr. Hudson's moral culpability," Maurie Levin, Hudson's lawyer, wrote in her petition seeking a Supreme Court reprieve and review.
Jurors never heard about his unstable childhood, a father with drug and alcohol problems, a mother with psychiatric problems and his own psychiatric treatment and medication to control his behavior and anger, Levin said.
State lawyers opposed the request, saying Hudson's petition presented no reasons for justices to review his case and failed to show any of his constitutional rights were violated.
Hudson had been on parole for only about six months after serving less than seven years of a 20-year term for check forgery when he was arrested for the murder. He's had two other paroles and at least eight convictions, including one for a 1987 murder in Dallas for which he took a plea bargain while he already was imprisoned.
Hudson did not testify at his capital murder trial and court records show he'd asked his lawyers not to call any witnesses. At the punishment phase, defense lawyers again called no witnesses while prosecutors called a fingerprint technician to introduce evidence of Hudson's earlier convictions and a jail employee who said Hudson had exposed himself and masturbated in front of her while he was awaiting trial.
Hudson, who declined to speak with reporters as his execution date neared, told police when he was arrested that he'd lost control.
"I loved Edith," he said in a written statement confession. "I am sorry for what has happened and have told the truth about the incident."
Evidence showed Hudson called Kendrick on the phone and became upset when he heard another man's voice in the background. Armed with a knife, he went to her apartment in Mesquite and kicked in the door, yelling that he was going to kill both of them and started swinging the knife. The other man fled.
Kendrick's 8-year-old son got between his mother and Hudson and was severely slashed. A witness outside in a parking lot saw Kendrick crash from the apartment to a balcony with Hudson grabbing her by the hair, then raising his arm as high as he could as he stabbed her six to eight times. Three wounds went to her heart and records showed any one of them would have killed her.
Kendrick's wounded son called 911 and identified Hudson as the attacker.
Police found Hudson at a nearby convenience store. They also found in his pocket a ladies' watch and blood-spattered money, identified as missing from Kendrick's purse. Kendrick's son required several operations to repair scars from his wounds.
"What an unbelieveable horror story," Rod Rohrich, a Dallas surgeon who treated the boy and last saw him about two years ago, said this week. "We fixed his scar. It had restricted his range of motion in his neck. ... I think it looks almost normal but, of course, there were the psychological scars."
Hudson's lethal injection was the last scheduled for this year in Texas, which has averaged 26 executions a year over the past decade. This year's total, while accounting for about half of the executions throughout the country, is down in part because of a de facto moratorium on the death penalty nationwide until Supreme Court earlier this year upheld lethal injection as a proper method.
At least 10 Texas inmates are scheduled to die next year, including six in January.
Source: Associated Press,November 20, 2008
