The US state of Texas executed a 48-year-old man by lethal injection on Tuesday, October 10, the Texas Department of Justice announced. Jedidiah Murphy was sentenced to death for threatening a 79-year-old woman with a gun and then shooting her.
The execution took place at a Huntsville prison on Tuesday, coinciding with the World Day Against the Death Penalty. This brings the number of executions in the United States this year to twenty.
“To the victim’s family, I want to say that I sincerely apologize for everything I have done. I hope this will comfort you, thank you,” he said as his last words, before reading a psalm. On October 4, 2000, in Garland, northeast of Dallas, Jedidiah Murphy threatened a 79-year-old woman with a gun so that she would take him in her car. After driving for about thirty minutes, he demanded the woman get into the trunk of the vehicle, before shooting her while she did so. The man then drove the victim’s car to Van Zandt County, where he removed it from the trunk and threw it into a creek, according to the Texas Department of Justice.
A sentence modification refused
According to pleadings from his lawyers, reported in the local press in recent weeks, Mr. Murphy had been abused as a child in foster care and showed signs of serious mental illness, including hallucinations. Although he did not deny the crime, he claimed he did not intend to shoot and tried unsuccessfully to obtain a reduction in his sentence.
Mr. Murphy’s lawyers recently got an appeals court to stay the execution, citing questions about the evidence used in his death sentence. He denied having participated in two robberies and a kidnapping for which he had also been charged and which had aggravated his case. However, the Supreme Court lifted this stay on Tuesday, at the request of the Texas Attorney General’s Office.
