(Washington) The US state of Texas plans to execute on Tuesday a man sentenced to death for the murder of his wife and her daughter.
Gary Green, 51, is to receive a lethal injection in Huntsville Penitentiary, in this vast conservative state in the southern United States.
He was sentenced to death in 2010 for stabbing his wife a year earlier in Dallas and drowning her six-year-old daughter in a bathtub.
The morning of the tragedy, his wife had sent him a breakup letter. He replied that “five lives would be lost”, recalls the local press.
In the end, he had not killed his wife’s two sons, aged 9 and 12, but had tried to end his life by swallowing a large dose of drugs.
His lawyers have tried in recent years to have his death sentence overturned, citing alleged mental illness and intellectual retardation. The Supreme Court has indeed prohibited the execution of persons incapable of understanding the meaning of the sentence.
At this stage, they have never won their case.
Gary Green is also one of the convicts to take legal action to stop Texas from executing him with lethal substances that may have passed their expiration date.
Despite a decision in their favor by a trial judge, three of the plaintiffs have already been executed since the beginning of the year.
Another execution, that of Arthur Brown for a quadruple murder he denies, is scheduled for Thursday in Texas.