Photo By BAHRAM MARK SOBHANI/San Antonio Express-News
HUNTSVILLE - Serial killer Tommy Lynn Sells - a drifter who has been linked to the deaths of more than a dozen people, including a 9-year-old San Antonio girl - was executed Thursday evening.
Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials pronounced him dead at 6:27 p.m., about 13 minutes after he was injected with a fatal dose of pentobarbital.
A Val Verde County jury sent Sells, 49, to death row in 2000 for the December 1999 stabbing death of 13-year-old Kaylene Harris in her family's trailer home near Del Rio. He confessed after a friend who was sleeping over that night survived having her own throat slit and helped identify him to authorities.
He later pleaded guilty in Bexar County to strangling 9-year-old Mary Beatrice Perez, who was abducted from a Fiesta event at Market Square in 1999. District Attorney Susan Reed agreed to drop her bid for a second death sentence, instead settling on life in prison, in exchange for the plea.
The execution came despite last-minute litigation by attorneys for Sells and another death row inmate seeking to have the U.S. Supreme Court intervene because Texas prison officials have refused to disclose details about a new batch of lethal drugs.
The high court sent word that it would not stop the execution about an hour before it was scheduled to begin.
The legal back-and-forth started a week ago, when a Travis County state district judge ordered the state to provide details about the lethal-drug suppliers to attorneys for Sells and Ramiro Hernandez Llanas, slated for execution next week for the bludgeoning death of a Kerrville rancher.
State prison officials appealed the first decision, first to the 3rd Court of Appeals in Austin and, after losing there, then to the Texas Supreme Court.
The convicts then filed a lawsuit in a Houston federal court on Tuesday, and a judge the next day granted their request for the information, which was quickly blocked by 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
As he waited word on his U.S. Supreme Court appeal Thursday, Sells was kept in a small holding cell just outside the execution chamber in Huntsville, said Jason Clark, spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Sells was quiet, reserved and accompanied by a chaplain. He had access to a phone, Clark said.
Lawyers for Sells argued, in part, that, 'the increasing scarcity of execution drugs - and consequent concerns about the quality and states' desperate efforts to keep the source of drugs secret - have become the central feature of botched executions and Eighth Amendment concerns.'
They wanted to know more about how the drug is manufactured in order to evaluate whether it would result in a cruel and unusual punishment.
'It is our belief that how we choose to execute prisoners reflects on us as a society,' said a statement released by Sells' lawyers, Maurie Levin and Jonathan Ross, moments after the court's decision was released. 'Without transparency about lethal injections, particularly the source and purity of the drugs to be used, it is impossible to ensure that executions are humane and constitutional.'
Texas officials, however, contended that they are not required to disclose details about the drug suppliers or other information because to do so would breach security of the supply chain and could subject suppliers to harassment and threats. They said there is no evidence pointing to the likelihood of severe pain.
Texas used the last of its previous batch of the drug last Thursday when it executed Anthony Doyle for the 2003 death of a food-delivery person.
The families of both slain children were on a list to witness the execution. Kaylene's witnesses included her father, brother and two grandmothers. Also present were the mother and grandmother of Mary
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