(Washington) The US state of Texas on Tuesday executed a man convicted of the 2009 murder of his wife and her daughter.
Gary Green, 51, was pronounced dead at 7:07 p.m. local time (8:07 p.m. Wednesday EST) from Huntsville Penitentiary in the sprawling conservative state in the southern United States.
He had been sentenced to death in 2010 for having, a year earlier in Dallas, stabbed his wife and drowned 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 was 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 having committed, is scheduled for Thursday in Texas.