Posted on 03/07/2007 10:31:45 PM PST by Aussie Dasher
A MAN who spent 25 years on Texas death row was executed by lethal injection today for a 1980 murder but only after prison officials had to carry him to the death chamber.
Joseph Nichols, 45, was the second person in as many days and the eighth person put to death this year in Texas.
The state leads the nation with 387 executions since 1982, when it reinstated the death penalty six years after the US Supreme Court lifted a capital punishment ban.
He refused to walk to the death chamber but did not put up a fight, a prison spokeswoman said. In his last statement, he cursed prison staffers.
Nichols was convicted and sentenced to die for shooting Claude Shaffer during the robbery of a Houston food store on October 13, 1980.
An accomplice, Willie Williams, was executed on January 31, 1995, after pleading guilty to the crime.
Lawyers for Nichols and death penalty opponents fought Nichols' executions on grounds that Shaffer had one bullet wound in his body, yet Houston prosecutors accused both Williams and Nichols in their separate trials of being the
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.au ...
This is almost ridiculous. If you are going to execute the man , do it within 5 years. After 25 years you are executing someone different.
Mr. Nichols could have been executed within five years. He chose to drag it out to 25 with appeals. The sentence was just and needed to be carried out.
Since the ex-human was dragging it out himself with appeals upon appeals, I would assume that he's the same person.
25 years to death is still faster than, say, California. Lightning quick, compared to some.
In California, 25 years won't even get you past the first round of appeals.
I understand that it takes at least 7 years for a lawyer to even be assigned to the case of a condemned prisoner.
The vast majority of the inmates on Death Row will expire from old age.
Well, it was either execute him or give him a pension.
Follow the link and check out the story, "In God We Trust" and "E Pluribus Unum" have been left off of unknown number of new $1 gold (colored) pieces.
Dead Man Walking,...er..Carried.
I just read it. Unbelievable!!!
And they expect us to believe it an accident...
In Mass. there's no death penalty (one year I think the voters passed a referendum to bring it back but the know-it-all
legislature stopped it) except in federal cases, etc. Whenever Texas executes an inmate, (conservative) talk host Howie Carr
of WRKO plays a snippet of the country tune "God Bless(ed)
Texas" followed by the sound effect of the electric chair...
2nd condemned Texas inmate in as many days executed.
HUNTSVILLE,
Texas — More than 26 years after he and a friend robbed a Houston convenience store
where a clerk was fatally shot, Joseph Nichols wound up in the same death house where
a dozen years earlier his partner was executed for the same crime.
The similarities between Nichols and his longtime friend,
Willie Ray Williams, ended in their final moments.
Williams in 1995 spoke of "love and peace of Islam" as he was executed.
If you come to Texas and commit a crime, there's plenty of room!
A convicted murderer, sentenced to death is "someone different" than most, yes. His end hardly approaches "rediculous" though.
Doesn't sound like this POS bothered with the obligatory sad eyed apologies to the survivors of the victim--meaning the man they murdered, not the POS. Does anyone know if his accomplice made with the phony apologies.
"After 25 years you are executing someone different."
Well, let's find the other guy and execute him, too.
Ok I will accept that. Still I think death penalty appeals processes take too long. Heck after 25 years all of the victim's immediate survivors may already have died natural deaths! If I had it my way the killer would be dead in 7 weeks.
OK, so give him a gold watch, throw him a retirement party, then snuff him out.
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