Reply #20: Texas Set for Two Executions Wednesday Night

[Up2Late]

(O.K., Tell me again about the "Culture of Life?" And how is it that one of these guys is 26? Why are they in such a rush to kill this guy?)

Texas Set for Two Executions Wednesday Night

Mon Apr 18, 2005 05:53 PM ET

By Jeff Franks

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Texas, the leading U.S. death penalty state, is set to carry out a rare double execution on Wednesday night, when two men convicted of separate murders will receive lethal injections. Barring intervention by the courts or Gov. Rick Perry, Douglas Roberts, 42, will be put to death first, followed quickly by Milton Mathis, 26, officials said on Monday.

Originally, they said Mathis would go first but later said that was incorrect because Roberts was sent to prison before Mathis. "Witnesses to the first execution will be escorted out and witnesses to the second will be brought in," said prison spokeswoman Michelle Lyons. "All the medical supplies and bedding will be switched. When we proceed will depend, as always, on what is working in the courts," she said.

Texas leads the nation with 340 executions since resuming capital punishment in 1982 after the lifting of a death penalty by the U.S. Supreme Court. It was the last state to kill two people on the same night. That took place on Aug. 9, 2000 when Brian Roberson, 36 and Oliver Cruz, 33, died 30 minutes apart in the Texas death chamber, which is at a state prison in Huntsville, 75 miles north of Houston.

Texas also did it on Jan. 31, 1995 and June 4, 1997. Before that, it had not happened in the state since Sept. 5, 1951. The most known executions in Texas in one day took place on Feb. 8, 1924 when the state used its new electric chair to put five people to death.

(more at link above)