Michael Richard - the last American execution until May 2008.

Michael Richard - the last American execution until May 2008.

A U.S. Supreme Court decision to review whether lethal injection procedures were unconstitutionally cruel failed to stop the execution of a Texas man as the high court allowed his punishment to be carried out.

Michael Richard, 49, was put to death by lethal injection Tuesday the 25th of September 2007 within the Walls Unit at Huntsville Texas, using a combination of drugs that U.S. Supreme Court justices hours earlier decided they would examine after a challenge from two condemned inmates in Kentucky.

Richard’s Texas Defender Service lawyers had gone to the court asking that lethal injection in Texas be halted and cited the Kentucky case (Baze v Rees) in their appeal. 

However the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals closed at 5 p.m. on the day of the scheduled 6 p.m. execution, and Judge Sharon Keller refused to accept an appeal filed a few minutes after that time.  

She came under heavy criticism for this action.  She later had to appear before the State Commission on Judicial Conduct.

About two hours after he was scheduled to die, Richard was taken to the Texas death chamber. 

In a brief final statement, he asked that his family take care of themselves and expressed love to a friend.  "Let's ride," he said just before the drugs began flowing. After several seconds and as the lethal concoction began taking effect, he added: "I guess this is it."

Nine minutes later he was pronounced dead.

Richard, a twice-imprisoned burglar, was condemned for the attack, rape and robbery of Marguerite Lucille Dixon, 53, at her home in Hockley in far northwest Harris County in 1986.

Richard had at least five felony convictions and had been released from his second prison term just eight weeks before the slaying.

"If he made peace with himself and got over this issue, that's all that matters to me," Stephen Dixon, Marguerite Dixion’s son, said after watching Richard die. 

"I had forgiven him for my own sake. I had to."

Dixon, a mother of seven who worked as a nurse, had offered Richard a drink of water after he came up to her house and inquired whether a van parked outside was for sale. 

The vehicle wasn't and Richard left, noticing that two of Dixon's children who were home at the time left shortly after he did. Evidence showed he returned, raped the woman, fatally shot her, then stole two televisions and drove off in the van.

Richard acknowledged being at Dixon's home, accounting for his fingerprint on a sliding glass door. But he insisted he wasn't responsible for the woman's death.

"I went by that house, true enough, asked to buy a car, and I left," he said last week from death row.

The van was found abandoned in Houston, about 30 miles to the southeast, and Richard later took officers to where he gave the .25-caliber pistol used in Dixon's death to a friend. Evidence showed he swapped the TVs for some cocaine.

Richard's lawyers initially argued he was mentally retarded and not eligible for lethal injection under a U.S. Supreme Court order barring execution of mentally retarded people. 

The justices turned down that appeal about 6 p.m., the hour when the execution could have taken place, then returned to his case to deal with the lethal injection claim.

Two of Dixon's children found the house dark and ransacked, then found their mother's body. A fingerprint on the glass door led police to Richard, who confessed the shooting was an accident. From prison, he said the confession wasn't his.

"Either the sentence needs to be carried out or not carried out," said Lee Coffee, who prosecuted Richard in 1987 and is now a judge in Memphis, Tenn. "I don't think it's fair to anyone, the defendant, the victim, family members, the justice system.

"The impression overall the public has of the criminal justice system is it's inefficient and woefully and painfully slow."

Richard was convicted and sentenced to death in 1987. 

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals threw out his conviction in 1992 because jurors improperly were not allowed to consider evidence that as a child Richard had been abused. In 1995, a second jury convicted him again and again sentenced him to die.

"I've been here forever," Richard said last week from death row, where he was known as "Louisiana Red." "I just try to live for every day. Everybody's going to die. I just know the date."

The date was Tuesday.

Richard first went to prison in 1978 with a six-year term for burglary. He was paroled about three years later, then returned to prison in 1985 with a five-year sentence for theft and forgery. 

He was released on mandatory supervision after 17 months. Dixon's slaying occurred eight weeks later.