Texas executes LeJames Norman

Texas kills man by lethal injection in state’s fifth execution this year

A man convicted over the shooting deaths of 3 people was executed on Wednesday in Texas, while another execution scheduled for the same time in Georgia was halted by a judge.

It’s the 5th execution in Texas this year. Georgia has yet to put anyone to death this year. The nation’s busiest death chamber is in Florida, which accounted for more than 1/2 the 25 executions already carried out in the US this year.

LeJames Norman, 40, was sentenced to death over the 2005 deaths of Samuel Roberts, 24, Tiffani Peacock, 18, and Celso Lopez, 38, inside the home they shared in a small, rural town. He died by injection of the sedative pentobarbital at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas.

Stacey Humphreys, 53, was convicted of malice murder and other crimes in the 2003 killings of 33-year-old Cyndi Williams and 21-year-old Lori Brown. He had been scheduled to die at 7pm ET at the state prison near Jackson in Georgia. However, a judge halted Humphreys’ execution late on Tuesday after his lawyers filed a petition seeking a resentencing under a new state law that allows victims of abuse to have their sentences reconsidered and reduced if they can tie their crimes to abuse they suffered.

The state appealed against that ruling, asking the Georgia Supreme Court to find that Humphreys was not entitled to have his sentence reconsidered under the new law. But the high court declined to hear that appeal before the scheduled execution time and left the lower court’s stay in place.

Norman and Ker’Sean Ramey believed there was cocaine in the house in Edna, a small, rural city about 100 miles (161km) south-west of Houston, and hoped to steal it, according to court records. But they never found any drugs and fatally shot 3 people in the home. Lopez was shot 4 times, including 3 in the back of his head. Peacock was shot twice in the head. Roberts was shot 5 times to the chest, neck, and head.

Norman was arrested about 5 months after the killings while trying to cross back into the US from Mexico. He pleaded guilty to capital murder, leaving a jury to decide his punishment.

Ramey was also convicted in the shootings and sentenced to death. His execution is set for next week.

The Texas board of pardons and paroles on Monday voted against commuting Norman’s sentence to a lesser penalty or recommending a 90-day reprieve of execution. After the Texas court of criminal appeals on Monday denied a motion from Norman’s attorneys for a stay of execution based on claims regarding actions by the prosecution, his attorneys have asked the US Supreme Court to review the decision.

In 2017, the Supreme Court refused to review Norman’s appeal that raised questions about the competence of his trial attorneys.

In his most recent petition, filed to the Supreme Court on Monday, Norman argued that prosecutors misrepresented facts between his and Ramey’s trial to make Norman seem more culpable for the killings.

The Supreme Court rejected the petition and a request for a stay of execution Wednesday afternoon.

Norman also sued the state in August alongside John Rubio, another death row inmate with an execution scheduled for November, asking a Travis County district judge to block Texas’ use of pentobarbital, the drug it uses for lethal injections. The suit argued that Texas’ supply of the drug was either expired or created through unreliable means at third-party compounding facilities.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has tested its supply of pentobarbital for potency and will extend its use date if they determine it will work effectively, a process critics have called unreliable and unsafe. A Travis County district judge temporarily barred use of the drug before the 2023 execution of Robert Fratta over concerns about the practice, but that ruling was overturned by Texas’ Court of Criminal Appeals, and Fratta was executed.

Norman was executed by lethal injection and pronounced deceased at 6:44 p.m., according to the Texas Department of Justice. He had no final statement before he was executed, a department spokesperson said.

Norman becomes the 5th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in Texas and the 610th overall since the state resumed capital punishment on December 7, 1982. Norman becomes the 84th condemned inmate to be put to death in Texas since Greg Abbott became governor in 2015.

Norman becomes the 26th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1,689th overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977.

Source: Associated Press, Staff, Rick Halperin, September 16, 2026

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde

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