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The Texas 7 were a group of prisoners who escaped from the John B. Connally Unit near Kenedy, Texas, on December 13, 2000. Six of the seven were apprehended over a month later, between January 22–24, 2001, as a direct result of the television show America's Most Wanted. The seventh committed suicide before he could be arrested. The surviving members were all convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Irving, Texas, police officer Aubrey Wright Hawkins, who was shot and killed when responding to a robbery perpetrated by the Texas Seven. Four of the six sentenced have since been executed.
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Charles Brooks Jr., also known as Shareef Ahmad Abdul-Rahim, was a convicted murderer who was the first person to be executed using lethal injection. He was the first prisoner executed in Texas since 1964, and the first African-American to be executed anywhere in the United States in the post-Gregg era.
Keith Bernard Clay and Shannon Charles Thomas were American murderers who killed a total of four people between December 1993 and January 1994. Thomas was convicted of the Christmas Eve, 1993 murders of 32-year-old Roberto Rios and his two children: 10-year-old Maria Rios and her 11-year-old brother, Victor Rios, in their Baytown, Texas home. Clay had also been present during the killings and confessed to attacking Roberto. Clay was convicted of the 1994 murder of a gas station clerk, during which Thomas was present. The killing occurred less than two weeks after the Rios family murders. Both were executed by lethal injection by the U.S. state of Texas, in 2003 and 2005, respectively.
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Marvin Lee Wilson was executed by the State of Texas on August 7, 2012, despite experts finding his IQ was 61. Supreme Court rulings subsequent to his execution in 2014 and 2017 ruled that the Eighth Amendment protected people with this low of an IQ from being executed under the discretion some states, including Texas, were using at the time. Texas successfully used crime allegation specifics to argue against the expert IQ, but the states are no longer allowed to do that. He entered death row on May 9, 1994, for the murder of a police drug informant who had caught him dealing cocaine. On November 10, 1992, Wilson abducted and shot 21-year-old Jerry Robert Williams following a physical confrontation between the two in the 1500 block of Verone in Beaumont. Wilson then left the body of Williams at a bus stop where it was later found by a bus driver. At the time of the murder, Wilson had two previous convictions for robbery, one of them aggravated.
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The Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery is the main prison cemetery in Texas, located in Huntsville and operated by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ). The colloquial name for the cemetery is Peckerwood Hill. The name originates from "Peckerwood", an insult towards poor white people, because many of those buried at the cemetery were poor.
Juan Martín García was a Texas man who was executed for capital murder.
Johnny Frank Garrett was a death row prisoner executed by the State of Texas.
References
- 1 2 List of Executed Offenders. Texas Department of Criminal Justice . Retrieved 26 September 2012. Note the list is updated within 1-2 days after the actual execution.
- ↑ In some cases, the offender may not have been tried for some of the victims listed, as a death sentence was rendered in a prior case.
- ↑ McCullough, Jolie (2019-08-21). "Texas executed Larry Swearingen for a 1998 Texas slaying. His lawyer says bad science got him on death row". The Texas Tribune. Retrieved 2024-03-30.