HUNTSVILLE, Texas – Convicted killer Johnny Ray Conner was executed Wednesday evening for the slaying of a Houston convenience store clerk during a failed robbery nine years ago.
The execution was the 400th in the nation's most active death penalty state since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume in 1976. Texas resumed executions six years later.
Mr. Conner asked for forgiveness repeatedly and expressed love to his family and his victim's family, who watched him through windows in the death chamber.
"This is destiny. This is life. This is something Allah wants me to do," he said. "What is happening to me is unjust and the system is broken."
He was pronounced dead at 6:20 p.m., eight minutes after the lethal drugs began to flow.
Mr. Conner, 32, was the 21st inmate put to death this year in Texas. Three more are scheduled to die next week.
Earlier Wednesday, his lawyers lost an appeal to the Supreme Court to stop the execution. In arguments rejected by the justices, Mr. Conner contended his trial attorneys were deficient for not investigating an old leg injury that left him with a limp, which would have prevented him from running away quickly from the store where Kathyanna Nguyen, 49, was gunned down on a Sunday afternoon in May 1998.
Witnesses who identified Mr. Conner as the gunman told of seeing a man running from the scene. None mentioned a limp.
A federal judge agreed with the argument and granted Mr. Conner a new trial. A federal appeals court disagreed and overturned that ruling this year, clearing the way for his execution.
The prospect of Mr. Conner becoming Texas' 400th executed prisoner prompted an outcry from death penalty opponents.
The European Union, which opposes capital punishment and bans it in its 27 nations, urged Gov. Rick Perry to stop the execution and impose a death penalty moratorium.
Perry spokesman Robert Black said the state would decline the call for a moratorium.
Scheduled to die Tuesday is DaRoyce Mosley, for his part in the slayings of four people in the robbery of a bar in Kilgore in 1994.
Source : Associated Press
