The state's highest criminal court has upheld the death sentence of one of Texas' longest-serving death row inmates.
A divided Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Wednesday rejected arguments that 55-year-old Bobby James Moore is mentally impaired and ineligible for execution.
Two of the eight judges involved in the ruling disagreed with the majority.
Moore has been on death row since July 1980, three months after a 72-year-old Houston supermarket clerk, James McCarble, was fatally shot during a robbery. Only six of the state's some 250 condemned inmates have been on death row longer.
Moore received a new punishment hearing in 2001 after a federal court threw out his original death sentence.
In 1986, the Houston man came within 10 hours of execution before he received a federal court reprieve.
