Texas' oldest death-row inmate is executed
WASHINGTON — A 67-year-old man convicted of killing four men more than three decades ago at a North Texas ranch has been executed.
Lester Bower is the oldest prisoner put to death in Texas since the state resumed capital punishment in 1982.
He received a lethal injection Wednesday evening for fatally shooting the four in October 1983 at an airplane hangar on the ranch about 60 miles north of Dallas.
Bower had insisted he was innocent and said the men were alive and well when he left after buying the ultralight airplane. But he couldn't prove he made the purchase and then lied to authorities when he was questioned.
He's the eighth Texas inmate put to death this year.
The Supreme Court refused to block his the execution. The justices' refusal to postpone Lester Bower's death came four months after they had blocked an earlier execution date to review issues of prosecutorial misconduct, judicial mistakes and the sheer duration of time Bower had spent on the nation's most active death row.
Bower cited a series of disputes over the way in which his clean criminal record and evidence of good character was handled by jurors and judges.
In March, the high court had turned down Bower's case over the dissents of Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.
"I recognize that we do not often intervene only to correct a case-specific legal error. But the error here is glaring, and its consequence may well be death," Breyer wrote then.
Texas executes prisoners with the drug pentobarbital, which has not been implicated in several recent executions in which condemned inmates writhed and moaned in apparent pain. The state has executed seven of the 14 inmates to die nationwide this year.
Another drug, midazolam — used as part of a three-drug protocol — is under review by the Supreme Court because of problems with executions last year in Oklahoma, Arizona and Ohio. The case was heard in April and will be decided in the next few weeks.
CONTRIBUTING: Associated Press