Texas executes Kimberly McCarthy

Kimberly McCarthy

Kimberly McCarthy, 52, was put to death by lethal injection at 6:37 p.m. Wednesday, making her one of a small number of women to have been executed.

In her final statement, McCarthy did not mention her status as the 500th inmate to be executed or acknowledge Booth or her family.

"This is not a loss. This is a win. You know where I'm going. I'm going home to be with Jesus. Keep the faith. I love you all," she said, while looking toward her witnesses - her attorney, her spiritual adviser and her ex-husband, New Black Panther Party founder Aaron Michaels.

As the drug started to take effect, McCarthy said, "God is great," before closing her eyes. She took hard, raspy, loud breaths for several seconds before becoming quiet. Then, her chest moved up and down for another minute before she stopped breathing.

Friends and family of Booth told reporters after the execution that they were not conscious that Texas had carried out its 500th execution since 1982. They said their only focus was on Booth's brutal murder.

Donna Aldred, Booth's daughter, reading a statement to reporters, said that her mother "was an incredible person who was taken before her time." 

McCarthy, a former cocaine addict, was convicted of killing her 71-year-old neighbor during a 1997 robbery. She was found guilty of using a butcher knife and a candelabra to beat and stab retired college professor Dorothy Booth. Using the same knife, she severed Booth's finger to steal her wedding ring.

McCarthy was granted a retrial by an appeals court in 2002 on the ground that police had obtained her confession illegally, but she was sentenced to death row again.

Members of Booth's family said they didn’t care about Texas' macabre tally, only about justice for their loved one.

"The only significance for us is that Kimberly McCarthy, because of her crack cocaine addiction or her sociopathic personality, deprived us of Dorothy Booth," Randy Browning, Booth's godson, told The Dallas Morning News. "Whether it's the 500th or the 5,000th, it doesn't matter."

Browning had said he planned to attend the execution Wednesday evening.

A death row inmate is executed every three weeks in Texas, a rate that far exceeds that of any other state. Texas is the leader in executions in the U.S. by about 400, with Virginia a distant second. Since the Supreme Court ruled on death penalty laws in 1976, Texas has accounted for 40 percent of the more than 1,300 executions nationwide.

Despite a cultural shift away from the death penalty in many parts of the country, 32 states still allow it.

The rate of executions has declined in recent years in Texas, as well. More than three dozen people were executed in 2000, but this year, McCarthy was the eight person subjected to capital punishment.

But many Texans support the death penalty, according to a 2012 poll by the Texas Tribune and the University of Texas. Only 21 percent said they were opposed.

Gov. Rick Perry is among the majority.

"I think our process works just fine," Perry said in 2012 during his unsuccessful presidential bid. "You may not agree with them, but we believe in our form of justice."

McCarthy was the first woman put to death in the U.S. in more than three years and the 13th since the Supreme Court's ruling. The last woman executed in the U.S. was Teresa Wilson Lewis in Virginia on Sept. 23, 2010.

In the past year, McCarthy’s execution has been pushed back twice, most recently in early April. Her attorney, Maurie Levin, continued to fight for McCarthy, but her latest appeal to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals was rejected Tuesday.

Levin said black jurors were improperly blocked from McCarthy's trial, a claim the convicted woman made in her appeals.

"The shameful errors that plagued Ms. McCarthy’s case — race bias, ineffective counsel and courts unwilling to exercise meaningful oversight of the system — reflect problems that are central to the administration of the death penalty as a whole," Levin said.

McCarthy's trial was decided by an all-white jury despite Levin's claim that four non-white jurors qualified. McCarthy is black, and Levin said the Dallas County jury selection process has a "troubling and long-standing history of racial discrimination in jury selection."

The only way McCarthy could have avoided the death penalty was if the court had said it wanted more time to review the appeal, said John Hurt, a prison agency spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Huntsville unit.

Levin told NBC News on Wednesday morning there was "no chance" of that happening because the court had already struck down her appeal.

"For this to be the emblem of Texas' 500th execution is something all Texans should be ashamed of," she said.

There are currently 283 men and women on death row in Texas.

McCarthy was the 8th Texas prisoner executed this year. She was among 10 women on death row in Texas, but the only one with an execution date. 7 male Texas prisoners have executions scheduled in the coming months. 

McCarthy becomes the 500th condemned inmate to be put to death in Texas since the state resumed capital punishment on December 7, 1982. McCarthy becomes the 261st condemned inmate to be put to death in Texas since Rick Perry became governor in 2001.

McCarthy becomes the 18th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1338th overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977. 

Source: NBC News, Associated Press, Rick Halperin, June 26, 2013