Posted on 10/19/2006 9:53:53 PM PDT by Romney08
Livingston - A man scheduled to be executed for murdering a store clerk committed suicide early on Thursday in his death-row cell, less than 18 hours before he was scheduled to be executed, a prison official said.
Michael Dewayne Johnson slashed his throat with a makeshift blade fashioned from a small piece of metal attached to a wooden stick, said Michelle Lyons, spokesperson for the Texas department of criminal justice in Huntsville.
Prison guards had been checking on Johnson's welfare every 15 minutes, as is customary, when they
He was transported to a hospital in nearby Livingston, where he was pronounced dead, Lyons said.
Johnson, 29, who was scheduled to die shortly after 23:00 GMT on Thursday, was convicted in the 1995 killing of a Waco-area convenience store clerk.
He was 18 at the time of the crime.
Appeal still pending
Suicides on death row are not unprecedented, and his was at least the seventh suicide on death row in Texas.
But Johnson was the closest to his scheduled execution. His last-minute appeal was still pending before the US supreme court.
Johnson would have made the trip from death row to the death chamber in Huntsville, about 72km away, around midday on Thursday. He was to die by lethal injection.
In a recent prison interview, Johnson said he was not the man who gunned down 27-year-old Jeff Wetterman, and blamed his companion, David Vest.
Vest blamed the shooting on Johnson, took an eight-year prison term in a plea bargain and testified against his friend. Vest is now free.
Johnson, who was 18 at the time of the slaying in September 1995, would have been the 22nd Texas inmate executed this year and the first of five scheduled to die over the next five weeks.
The state now has 390 people on death row.
I'm trying to figure out if he saved us any money or not. On one hand, he saved us the juice, on another hand, we had to mop up the blood and all.
Hate to sound callous, but if a Death Row inmate kills himself, it's kinda hard for me to get upset about it.
Works for me.
Well, it is good that he got at least some civic responsibility. It would be much better, though, had he had enough of it to commit suicide BEFORE he killed that convenience-store clerk - say, in 1994 instead of 2006. But one could not have everything, I guess.
His motive is obvious. He knew the needle was too humane a punishment for his crimes, and therefore administered unto himself, the execution he felt he merited.
I LOVE it when the bad guy offs himself. He didn't cheat the hangman, he cheated those vigil bastards!!!! YEah!
That's the kind of spirit we need.
Now only if they would do that within the first year of conviction.
"His motive is obvious. He knew the needle was too humane a punishment for his crimes, and therefore administered unto himself, the execution he felt he merited."
You may be right. Like the guy in New Orleans who wrote that he was killing himself for murdering his girlfriend.
It doesn't change what they did, but it does earn them respect and understanding as human beings who made a uncorrectable mistake and genuinely regret what they did.
If his case was under appeal when he died, will the guilty verdict be vacated like Ken Lay's?
Either way it doesn't bother me. I just hope cutting his own his throat was more painful than the needle.
Could be, but the joke's on him, it had to hurt worse than a needle.
What a mental powerhouse this guy was. Instead of being strapped to a gurney and just "Going to sleep" he decided instead to bleed to death and lie in agony as he died.
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