A Texas inmate was executed by lethal injection Wednesday evening for killing a supervisor at a state prison shoe factory in Amarillo nearly 17 years ago.
Travis Runnels, 46, was convicted of slashing the throat of 38-year-old Stanley Wiley on January 29, 2003.
Runnels was executed at the state penitentiary in Huntsville.
Prosecutors say Runnels killed Wiley at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Clements Unit in Amarillo because he didn't like working as a janitor at the shoe factory.
They said Runnels had wanted to transfer to a job at the prison barber shop and was angry at Wiley because that hadn't happened.
Runnels, belted to the death chamber gurney, responded "No" when the warden asked if he had a final statement.
As the lethal dose of the powerful sedative pentobarbital was administered, he smiled and mouthed words and a kiss toward three female friends and two of his attorneys who watched through a window a few feet from him. He then blurted out "Woof, woof!" just before taking four quick breaths and snoring four times before all movement stopped.
He never looked at the sister and brother-in-law of his victim, who watched through a window in an adjacent witness room.
Runnels was pronounced dead at 7:26 p.m. CST, 22 minutes after the drug began flowing into his arms, making him the 22nd inmate put to death this year in the U.S. and the ninth in Texas.
Runnels is the final execution scheduled in Texas for 2019.
Outside the Huntsville Unit prison, several hundred Texas corrections officers stood in formation. Wiley's sister, Margaret Robertson, hugged or shook the hands of many of them as she and her husband left the prison.
Runnels had been serving a 70-year sentence for an aggravated robbery conviction from Dallas when he killed Wiley with a knife used to trim shoes. The factory makes shoes for inmates in the state prison system.
Earlier Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down an appeal by Runnels' attorneys, who said a prosecution witness at his 2005 trial provided false testimony and that no defense was presented because his lawyers called no witnesses and advised him to plead guilty.
Janet Gilger-VanderZanden, one of his more recent attorneys, said Runnels changed during his 14 years on death row.
"There is true and authentic remorse for the death of Mr. Wiley. There are no excuses, rather there is a commitment to finding some kind of light in what was once a world of only darkness," Gilger-VanderZanden said.
Lower courts and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles had also turned down Runnels' attorneys' requests to stop his execution.
Four inmates who were convicted in the deaths of state correctional officers or other prison employees have been put to death since 1974, while three others remain on death row, according to Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
At the factory, Runnels approached Wiley from behind, pulled his head back and used enough force for the knife to go through his trachea and cut Wiley's spinal cord.
"It was cowardly," prosecutor Randall Sims told jurors at Runnels' trial.
Wiley, who grew up in the Texas Panhandle city of Amarillo, began working as a state corrections officer in 1994. He was later promoted to a supervisory position.
Inmate Bud Williams Jr., who also worked at the shoe factory, testified that Wiley "was a good guy."
At his trial, Runnels' lawyers didn't present any witnesses or evidence, including information about Runnels' troubled childhood and family history of drug and alcohol abuse, Gilger-VanderZanden said.
In their petition to the Supreme Court, Runnels' attorneys argued that his death sentence was mainly due to the testimony of prison expert A.P. Merillat, who told jurors that inmates like Runnels could not be held in a secure environment if sentenced to life in prison without parole.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the death sentences of two inmates, in 2010 and 2012, after ruling that Merillat gave jurors incorrect information.
The Texas Attorney General's Office pointed to assaults by Runnels on other guards after Wiley's death, including throwing feces and a light bulb at them, as evidence that he was a future danger and merited a death sentence.
In his clemency petition to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, Runnels included letters from more than 25 individuals from around the world who said Runnels had worked to make amends for what he did.
"He has become a light that shines bright even in the darkest of spaces. The tragedy that he is responsible for will only be compounded if his valuable light were to be extinguished," Kristin Procanick, from Syracuse, New York, wrote in one of the letters.
Source: cbsnews.com, Staff, December 11, 2019
Texas executed Travis Runnels for a prison murder. His lawyers said false testimony put him on death row.
A Texas court has twice overturned death sentences because of one man’s false testimony on restrictions placed on prisoners. Runnels argued the same man’s testimony should have stopped his death, too.
Texas officials didn't dispute that prosecutors introduced false testimony at Travis Runnels’ 2005 capital murder trial in Amarillo. Instead, they argued the state should still execute him even if they did.
On Wednesday evening, Texas did just that, putting to death Runnels in the state’s execution chamber in Huntsville. The 46-year-old man was injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital at 7:04 p.m. while lying on a gurney and was pronounced dead 22 minutes later. He had three friends standing in an adjacent viewing room, and the sister and brother-in-law of the prison employee he killed stood in another room, according to a prison witness list.
He gave no final statement, according to a prison spokesperson.
There was no question of Runnels’ guilt in the 2003 prison murder of Stanley Wiley, a supervisor at the Clement Unit’s boot factory, where Runnels worked while serving a 70-year aggravated robbery sentence. He pleaded guilty at trial, despite knowing the state was seeking the death penalty.
But at his punishment hearing, where jurors in part weigh how likely a capital murder convict is to be dangerous in the future, the state introduced as a witness A.P. Merillat, who at the time was a criminal investigator for the state prosecutors who handle prison crimes. He has testified in at least 15 trials that resulted in death sentences, but his incorrect testimony on the levels of security in prisons has since led to two overturned death sentences in Texas.
Runnels’ lawyers had hoped the state’s reliance on Merillat’s testimony would prompt the U.S. Supreme Court to stop his execution, too.
“As was the case in several other capital trials in which Merillat testified, the purpose of his testimony was to establish for the jury that the state prison system’s security for non-death sentenced inmates was so lax that the defendant would be a danger to others in prison if he received a life sentence,” attorneys Mark Pickett and Janet Gilger-VanderZanden wrote in a petition to the high court.
About 30 minutes after his execution was scheduled to begin at 6 p.m., the high court issued a short ruling denying Runnels' final appeal.
The Supreme Court has ruled that a death sentence based on materially inaccurate evidence is unconstitutional, and a court must overturn a death sentence unless judges determine beyond a reasonable doubt that the falsehood didn't contribute to the punishment, according to a Texas court ruling. Texas and Potter County officials argued that Runnels’ crime and his assaults on guards afterward were more than enough for the jury to have decided he was a future threat, regardless of Merillat’s testimony.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected Runnels' appeal without comment or consideration of its merits last week. Potter County argued Texas law did not allow the court to review the appeal because it was filed too near his execution and could have been raised earlier. Pickett pointed plainly to the claim of false testimony in response.
"You shouldn’t be allowed to get a death sentence based on false testimony," he said after the Texas court ruling. "This is testimony that ... no one is disputing is false."
Merillat was called as a witness to describe how the Texas prison system decides the level of supervision and types of restrictions on housing and activity that inmates need. Generally, prisoners are assigned to one of five levels of the general population — G1 is the least restrictive, and G5 is the most — or to solitary confinement. Death row inmates are housed in solitary confinement, which means they are almost always in their cells except for solo recreation or limited visits behind glass.
At trial, Merillat testified that unless they are sentenced to death, capital murder convicts automatically are assigned to the relatively unrestricted housing as G3 inmates. Inmates at that level live in dorms or cells with other prisoners and have less supervision. They also have more job options and recreation time. Merillat said the prison wouldn’t look at previous convictions (Runnels had three) and that after 10 years, he could get an even less restrictive custody level.
Runnels’ lawyers said his testimony was “plainly and patently false.” And Merillat acknowledged in an interview with The Texas Tribune that he might have been wrong in Amarillo.
“When I testified, I testified with the knowledge that I had at the time,” he said.
Source:
texastribune.org, Jolie McCullough, December 11, 2019
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
