Texas is wasting little time this new year claiming its annual notoriety as the nation's most active capital punishment state.
Convicted killer Curtis Moore, condemned for the slayings of three people during a drug-ripoff robbery in 1995 in Fort Worth, is set for lethal injection this week in what would be the first execution in the United States in 2009.
It's the first of eight scheduled punishments this month in the U.S., all but two of them in Texas. The 18 prisoners put to death in Texas last year accounted for about half of the 37 executions carried out in the country. Since the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976 allowed capital punishment to resume, 423 Texas inmates have been put to death. Virginia was next with 102.
Moore, 40, was set to die Wednesday. Two more executions are set for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Huntsville Unit next week, then three more the following week.
The six Texas inmates set to die in January are among at least 14 with execution dates already this year. Three more are set to die in early February, four in March and another in April. Nationwide, they are among more than two dozen with dates already in 2009, according to statistics kept by the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington, D.C. anti-death penalty group.
"The only thing I could speculate is it's a result of the backlog created by the moratorium," said Kristin Houle, executive director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
A Supreme Court review of a Kentucky case that questioned whether lethal injections were unconstitutionally cruel stalled punishments from September 2007 until the justices last April okayed the method.
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"There's some general fallout from the fact we weren't executing anyone for eight or nine months," Houle said. "I think we're seeing this throughout the country."
Alabama, for example, carried out no executions in 2008. Already for 2009, however, five are scheduled for that state, including one for Thursday. Besides Texas and Alabama, inmates from Ohio, Oklahoma, Virginia and Tennessee are on the execution calendar.
In Texas, where a record 40 prisoners were put to death in 2000, execution dates are set by trial court judges from the county where the prisoner was convicted. For inmates now with scheduled dates, legal appeals either are exhausted or in the final stages in appeals courts.
"The people in Texas are duped. They think the justice system is working," said Larry Swearingen, 37, facing execution Jan. 27 for the strangulation of Melissa Trotter, a 19-year-old student abducted from Montgomery College north of Houston 10 years ago.
"I believe it's going to be a record year," he said.
Swearingen, who's hoping late appeals will spare his life, believes he was wrongly convicted, that his court-appointed trial lawyers, "worried about their next appointment," were part of "the bubba system" and that evidence favorable to him was manipulated and hidden to orchestrate his conviction. He'll get a reprieve "if there's any integrity in Texas," he said in an interview last week.
"But there's nothing I can do about that," he said. "I'm not going to boo-hoo about it. I'll continue my praying, continue my Bible studies."
Moore is set to begin the parade to the Huntsville death house, returning this week to the same place where he was taken in 2002, only to see the Supreme Court halt his punishment about three hours before he could have been executed. His lawyers then raised the possibility he was mentally retarded and ineligible for the death penalty. The Supreme Court denied that appeal in October.
Moore was on parole for robbery when he was arrested for killing three people in a pair of shootings Nov. 30, 1995.
Roderick Moore, 24, who was not related to him, and LaTanya Boone, 21, both of Fort Worth, were found shot to death in a roadside ditch across from a Fort Worth elementary school. The same night, Darrel Hoyle, then 21, of Fort Worth, and Henry Truevillain Jr., 20, of Forest Hill, were found shot and burned. Hoyle, however, survived and helped lead police to the arrest of Moore and his nephew, Anthony Moore, who then was 17.
Also set to die this month in Texas are:
- Frank Moore, 47, on Jan. 21, for fatally shooting two people in a car outside a San Antonio bar 15 years ago. Moore was a San Antonio gang member with an extensive criminal past.
- Reginald Perkins, 53, on Jan. 22, for the 2000 strangulation of his stepmother in Fort Worth. Gertie Perkins, 64, is one of six women -- three in Fort Worth and three in Cleveland, Ohio -- whose slayings are tied to him.
- Virgil Martinez, 40, on Jan. 28, for an October 1996 shooting rampage that left four people dead, including his ex-girlfriend, Veronica Fuentes, and her 3- and 6-year-old children.
- Ricardo Ortiz, 46, on Jan. 29, for the slaying of a fellow inmate at the El Paso County Jail in 1997. Ortiz, identified as a high-ranking prison gang member, was convicted of giving a lethal dose of heroin in 1997 to Gerardo Garcia, 22, to stop Garcia from testifying against him about bank robberies they both had committed.
More Information:
Death Penalty Information Center
