Another inmate set to become Texas execution No. 300

HUNTSVILLE, Texas - A week after condemned killer Delma Banks eluded the death chamber with a last-minute Supreme Court reprieve, another convicted murderer faced the distinction of becoming the 300th Texas inmate executed since the state resumed carrying out capital punishment 20 years ago.

Keith Bernard Clay, 35, of Baytown, was set to die Thursday night for killing a convenience store clerk during a robbery in 1994 in his hometown just east of Houston.

"I have peace of mind," he said last week from a tiny cage in the interview area of death row. "Whatever God's will is, I'm going to be content with.

Besides becoming No. 300 overall, Clay's execution would be the 11th this year in Texas and keep the state on a pace to surpass the record 40 lethal injections carried out in 2000. Texas accounts for more than one-third of the 836 executions in the United States since 1976, when the death penalty resumed under a Supreme Court ruling. Virginia is second with 87.

"As far as seeing guys go, there's a sense of loss," said Clay, who arrived on death row Sept. 10, 1997, a day after Texas executed its 133rd inmate, James Davis, convicted of fatally beating three children during a burglary at their Austin home. "People love life and want to continue to live."

Clay's case and the notoriety of becoming No. 300 in the nation's most active death penalty state failed to attract the kind of attention drawn last week to Banks.

Banks, on death row since 1980, contended he was wrongly convicted of killing a 16-year-old Texarkana-area youth and stealing his car. His appeals were bolstered by the backing of three former federal judges, including former FBI director William Sessions, a Texan.

Clay won no similar support and the Supreme Court last week refused to review his case.

"It's certainly not a good case to try to grasp on to any mental retardation, the evidence against him was real strong, there's no DNA, and the eyewitness identification is from a guy that knows him and was with him," Roe Wilson, who handles capital murder appeals in the Harris County District Attorney's office, said.

Clay was convicted of killing store clerk Melathethil Tom Varughese, who came to the United States from India a year earlier, in a $2,000 robbery.

"I didn't even know Texas had a death penalty," said Clay, an unmarried father of three who graduated from high school and attended community college for a year and a half. At the time of the slaying, he was working as a supermarket stock clerk.

Prosecutors also linked him to the Christmas Eve 1993 fatal shootings of three people, including two children, at a Baytown home. He denied any role in that killing spree and was not tried for those slayings although a companion was sent to death row.

Clay said he was outside the Baytown store where Varughese worked and in a car when the clerk was gunned down Jan. 4, 1994.

"I was just an innocent bystander," he said. "I didn't have any knowledge the store was going to be robbed."

A witness, however, identified Clay as the gunman. Evidence showed his gun was one of the two used in the shooting. The second weapon was like the one the clerk kept under the cash register and was taken in the robbery. Varughese also suffered a skull fracture when his head was beaten.

He was found "laying in the biggest pool of blood I've ever seen," said Marie Munier, one of the Harris County prosecutors at Clay's trial. "It's hard to ever figure out why somebody does something so horrendous."

"I started keeping bad companions," Clay said. "It's really true what parents say about keeping companions."

Banks' case, tried two years before Texas made Charlie Brooks in 1982 the first condemned inmate to die by injection, has been in the courts for more than two decades. But Clay, with less than six years on death row, is more typical of capital murder convicts condemned in recent years after death penalty laws underwent court scrutiny and newly enacted laws limited appeals, mandated stricter deadlines for filing them and allowed for simultaneous state and federal appeals.

It took nearly 13 years for Texas to reach 100, more than four years get to No. 200 and now just over three to reach the 300th execution.

Sixty-eight of those came from Harris County, the largest in Texas and third-largest in the nation.

"If Texas is the death penalty capital of the USA, Harris County ... is its main supplier of condemned inmates," the human rights organization, Amnesty International, which opposes capital punishment in all instances, said in a critical January report that noted the approach of the state's 300th execution.

"Only seven of the 38 death penalty states ... currently have more people on death row than Harris County. Nearly a quarter of the 291 prisoners executed in Texas between December 1982 and December 2002 were sentenced to death in this county."

"It would be better if we didn't have to have the death penalty, if we didn't have people who committed horrendous crimes and appeared to be very violent and dangerous to everybody else," said Munier, who won the conviction against Clay. "It would be a much nicer world if we didn't have people like that."

Texas Dept. of Criminal Justice

	Texas Department of Criminal Justice
Return to Death Row Page

Name	TDCJ Number	Date of Birth
Clay, Keith Bernard	999238	2/18/68
Date Received	Age (when Received)	Education Level (Highest Grade Completed)
9/10/97	29	12 years
Date of Offense	Age (at the time of Offense)	County
1/4/94	25	Harris
Race	Gender	Hair Color
Black	Male	Black
Height	Weight	Eye Color
5-9	180	Brown
Native County	Native State	Prior Occupation
Harris	Texas	Laborer
Prior Prison Record
Records indicate a 2-year sentence for possession of cocaine in 1990.
Summary of incident
On January 4, 1994, Clay murdered a male store clerk during the robbery of a Houston convenience store. The victim was severely beaten and shot repeatedly by Clay.
Co-defendants
Shannon Charles Thomas
Race and Gender of Victim
Unknown male
Photograph of Offender

Last Updated: September 05, 2001

http://www.prodeathpenalty.com/Pending/03/mar03.htm

Date of scheduled execution	State	Victim name	Inmate name	Status
March 18, 2003	Texas	Tom Varughese Robert Rios, 32 Maria Elda Isabell Rios, 10 Victor Roberto Rios, 11	Keith Clay	pending
A Houston jury deliberated 8 hours before deciding on the death sentence for Keith Bernard Clay, 28, in the murder of Melathethil Tom Varughese. Clay robbed the store in Baytown on Jan. 4, 1994, shot at Varughese 10 times, hitting him 6, then beat him with a pistol, said prosecutor Marie Munier. The jury also heard about an unrelated crime Clay allegedly was involved in just a week before the robbery -- the Christmas Eve 1993 murders of a Baytown man and his 2 young children. Clay's co-defendant in that case, Shannon Thomas, is already on death row for those murders. At about 6:30 p.m. on Dec. 24, 1993, Jose Rios walked into his brother's Baytown home when no one answered his knock on the door. He and his mother, wife and children were visiting the brother's family, bearing Christmas gifts. "I opened the door and saw the Christmas tree with gifts," Rios said. "I opened the door a little more and saw my brother lying on the floor with blood on him." Rios found his brother shot to death on the floor, with a knife in his throat. He called 911, and his wife screamed from upstairs that the children, Maria Elda Isabell Rios, 10, and Victor Roberto Rios, 11, also were dead. Hours before, Thomas, 24, and Clay, 27, burst into the Rios home and bound Roberto Rios with duct tape before stabbing him and shooting him twice in the head. Then the two men went upstairs to the children's bedroom, made them lie face-down on the floor and shot each of them once in the back of the head. Police speculated at the time that that the killings were drug-related. Rios was a drug dealer who mostly sold marijuana. Thomas and Clay apparently had bought drugs from Rios and assumed he would have money in the house. The children probably were killed because they were potential witnesses, according to police. The children's mother was divorced from Rios and lived in Mexico at the time of the killing. The triple murder was unsolved for two years before authorities received a tip after the pair had bragged to friends about the murders. When Thomas and Clay gave statements to police, each admitted having been at the scene but each denied that he was the shooter. Prosecutor Munier said that Thomas did the shooting, but that Clay may have held the children down. In the convenience store robbery and murder, there was witness. Clay went in the store about 8:30 pm. looking more to kill than to rob, Munier said, adding that "it was a vicious, brutal murder, I think not so much for the money, but to prove that he was a killer to his friend." The jury agreed with the prosecution that Clay constituted a future threat to society, and, rejecting the defense's call for a life sentence, returned with a verdict of death.

Execution is state's 300th in 20 years

03/21/2003

Associated Press

HUNTSVILLE, Texas – An apologetic Keith Clay was executed Thursday night, becoming the 300th inmate put to death in Texas since the state resumed the death penalty 20 years ago.

In a brief statement, Clay asked God to "forgive me of every single solitary sin I have committed these 35 years I have lived upon this Earth."

Then Clay looked at three members of his victim's family, who were watching through a nearby window, and asked them for forgiveness. "I know you have suffered a great loss and I am truly, truly sorry. ...There is not a day that I have not prayed for you," he said.

Clay then turned to his mother, watching through an adjacent window. He told her he loved her and said "The Lord is my shepherd. Let everyone know that I love them. This is not goodbye. I will see you later."

His mother, Cynthia Smith, smiled and flashed two thumbs up to him.

He began praying softly to himself as the drugs began taking effect. He gasped three times. His eyes briefly widened and rolled back before his eyes closed. Eight minutes later at 6:23 p.m., he was pronounced dead.

Also Online

	Texas Executions: Coverage from TXCN.com
	Offender profile: Keith Clay

Related links
	Texas Department of Criminal Justice
	Scheduled executions
	Offenders on death row

Clay's execution, the 11th this year in the nation's most active execution state, came a week after another inmate, Delma Banks, avoided lethal injection and the notoriety of No. 300 when he won a last-minute reprieve from the U.S. Supreme Court.

Clay, 35, was condemned for fatally shooting a convenience store clerk during a 1994 robbery in Baytown, just east of Houston. The Supreme Court last week refused to review his case and the state parole board refused to consider a clemency petition because it was filed 15 days too late.

"Whatever God's will is for my life I'm going to accept," Clay said from death row last week. "I refer to my faith. Lord Jesus, he was wrongly convicted for something he didn't do and paid the price."

Clay's injection keeps Texas on a pace to surpass the record 40 lethal injections carried out in 2000. Another is scheduled for next week and three more are scheduled for April.

Texas accounts for more than one-third of the now 839 executions in the United States since 1976 when the death penalty resumed under a Supreme Court ruling. Virginia is second with 87.

It took nearly 13 years for Texas to reach 100 executions, four years get to No. 200 and now, as the appeals process has become more streamlined, just over three to reach the 300th.

Clay's case failed to generate the kind of attention paid last week to Banks, who contended he was wrongly convicted of a 1980 slaying near Texarkana. Banks' appeals were bolstered by the backing of three former federal judges, including former FBI director William Sessions.

Clay, an acknowledged former drug dealer who authorities said also was involved in a triple slaying in 1993, attracted no similar support.

Clay was convicted of killing store clerk Melathethil Tom Varughese, who came to the United States from India a year earlier, in a $2,000 robbery.

"I'm not happy to see someone put to death, but I know that the trial was a fair trial, he was represented by good counsel and it was a horrible crime," said Marie Munier, the Harris County district attorney who prosecuted Clay.

"I think it's justice. It's not that it makes me happy at all, but it's just the price he will pay for his actions."

Clay denied participating in the Varughese killing and denied any role in the Christmas Eve 1993 fatal shootings of three people, including two children, at a Baytown home. He was not tried for the triple slayings although a companion was sent to death row.

Clay said he was outside the Baytown store where Varughese worked and in a car when the clerk was gunned down Jan. 4, 1994. A witness, however, identified Clay as the gunman. Evidence showed his gun was one of the two used in the shooting.

"I've been praying for the victim's family, for my family," Clay said from death row. "With regard to me being down here, if there's one thing I could put my finger on, it would be decisions were made that bring about consequences, whether good or bad. What you do or say not only affects your life but others as well."

Online at: http://www.dallasnews.com/latestnews/stories/032103dntexexecution.d6db8.html

Full article on #9 . . .