A Texas man convicted of fatally beating his 83-year-old great aunt more than two decades ago was executed on Wednesday evening despite requests from some of the victim’s family to spare his life.
Quintin Jones, 41, received the lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville for the September 1999 killing of Berthena Bryant.
Prosecutors said after Ms Bryant refused to lend Jones money, he beat her with a bat in her Forth Worth home then took 30 dollars from her purse to buy drugs.
Some of Ms Bryant’s family members, including her sister Mattie Long, had said they did not want Jones to be executed.
“Because I was so close to Bert, her death hurt me a lot. Even so, God is merciful. Quintin can’t bring her back. I can’t bring her back. I am writing this to ask you to please spare Quintin’s life,” Ms Long wrote in a letter that was part of Jones’s clemency petition with the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.
The board denied Jones’s clemency petition on Tuesday. Texas governor Greg Abbott did not go against that decision and declined to delay the execution. The US Supreme Court also declined to halt the 41-year-old man’s execution.
Calls for clemency from campaigners including the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) were also unsuccessful.
ANOTHER BLACK MAN WILL LOSE HIS LIFE in just a few hours because of the inconsistencies in our system. @GovAbbott we are demanding a 30 day reprieve of execution for #QuintinJones.
We can't undo a wrong decision!
A life is worth 30 days. Humanity deserves due process!— NAACP (@NAACP) May 19, 2021
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On Wednesday, Jones’s lawyer filed a civil rights complaint against the board, alleging race played “an impermissible role” in its denial of Jones’s petition. A US District Judge dismissed the complaint, writing that Jones did not present direct evidence of that allegation.
Helena Faulkner, a Tarrant County assistant criminal district attorney whose office prosecuted Jones, said not all of Ms Bryant’s family members had opposed the execution.
Jones became the 571st inmate to receive lethal injection in Texas since the state resumed carrying out capital punishment in 1982 and the first without a media witness.
Reporters from The Associated Press and local newspaper The Huntsville Item were scheduled as media witnesses to the punishment but were not escorted by corrections agency officials from an office across the street from the prison.
“The Texas Department of Criminal Justice can only apologize for this error and nothing like this will ever happen again,” state prison agency spokesman Jeremy Desel said later.
