In Texas we have the death penalty, and WE USE IT!
Posted on 06/18/2007 3:57:47 PM PDT by Graybeard58
HOUSTON — Two condemned Texas prisoners moved closer to execution Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review their cases. The inmates include one set to die in August for raping and fatally shooting a woman while her two children were laying nearby in their Bay City home.
Kenneth Parr, 27, is scheduled for lethal injection Aug. 15 for the slaying of Linda Malek, 28. At Parr's trial, Malek's then 10-year-old daughter testified how Parr was one of two men to enter their trailer home, attack her mother and steal a television, VCR and other items. The girl and her half brother, then 8, were not injured. She called a grandparent after the intruders left to report the shooting, the only homicide in Matagorda County in 1998.
The high court also refused to review the case of Gregory Wright, condemned for the fatal stabbing of a woman 10 years ago at her home in DeSoto in Dallas County. Wright, 38, does not have an execution date.
In another Texas capital murder case, the justices refused the state's request to review a lower court ruling that tossed out the death sentence of Billy Ray Nelson, a Big Spring man convicted of raping and fatally stabbing his neighbor more than 16 years ago.
In Parr's case, his half brother, Michael Jiminez, also was convicted of capital murder. He is serving a life prison term. Jiminez was 17 at the time of the slaying.
Wright was condemned for the March 1997 slaying of Donna Duncan Vick, 52. Wright, from Knox County, Tenn., was homeless at the time when he and another transient, John Wade Adams, were invited by Vick, a religious widow, into her home where she offered them food and a place to sleep.
Dallas County prosecutors presented evidence that showed the men killed her with a knife from her own kitchen and looted her home so they could get money to buy crack cocaine. Adams, a native of Tuscaloosa, Ala., also was convicted of capital murder and is on death row.
In the third Texas death row case, the high court rejected the state's request to review a December decision from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that overturned Nelson's death sentence.
Lawyers for Nelson, 38, contend the Howard County jury that convicted him in 1991 of the slaying of Charla Wheat, 18, was unable to take into consideration his mental disorder, an abusive childhood that included abandonment by his mother and history of drug and alcohol abuse before they decided he should be sentenced to death.
A second woman, who was five months pregnant, also was attacked at Wheat's apartment Feb. 23, 1991, and pretended to be dead as her roommate was beaten and stabbed 13 times. The wounded woman called for help after Nelson left and identified him later as their attacker.
The New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court voted 9-7 in December to overturn rulings of lower courts that upheld Nelson's death sentence. The Supreme Court refused to review that decision Monday.
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