HUNTSVILLE, Texas -- Convicted killer Carlos DeLuna, who maintained he was wrongly condemned for the slaying of a gas station attendant during a $150 robbery, was executed early Thursday by lethal injection.
DeLuna, 27, was pronounced dead at 12:24 a.m. CST at the Texas Department of Corrections in Huntsville. He glanced nervously at the prison chaplain and then closed his eyes as an overdose was administered.
DeLuna maintained that he did not kill Wanda Jean Lopez of Corpus Christi on Feb. 4, 1983, in a robbery that netted $150. He recently told reporters the state was executing the wrong man.
'I want to say that I hold no grudge against nobody,' DeLuna told reporters moments before his execution. 'I hate nobody. I want my family to know I love them.
'I want to tell everyone on death row, keep the faith up. Everything will be all right.'
DeLuna visited with relatives late Wednesday afternoon after the Supreme Court rejected his request for a stay of execution. Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall dissented.
DeLuna was the 120th person executed since the Supreme Court lifted its ban on capital punishment in 1976, the 33rd person executed in Texas since the state resumed executions in 1982 and the fourth in 1989.
His final meal was peaches and ice cream, which he ate about 7 p.m., said Charles Brown of the Department of Corrections. The inmate had refused all meals up until that time.
DeLuna spent several hours Wednesday afternoon visiting with two sisters, a half-brother, half-sister and a friend, Brown said, but the condemned man did not have any personal witnesses at his execution.
On Tuesday, DeLuna talked by telephone with his brother Manuel, who is serving a 10-year prison sentence for burglary.
He was removed from death row about 8:15 a.m. Wednesday and driven about 16 miles to the prison unit where executions are carried out.
He appeared calm as he was placed in a holding cell adjacent to the death chamber, Brown said.
DeLuna's lawyer, Richard Anderson of Dallas, turned to the Supreme Court after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans refused Tuesday to intervene in the case.
Anderson argued that his client's execution should have been stayed until the court can consider whether his trial jury should have heard details about DeLuna's background that might have saved him from the death sentence.
The lawyer said jurors might have been more sympathetic had they known DeLuna, who was 20 at the time of the murder, had a history of paint and glue sniffing and that psychiatric examinations showed he might have a low IQ.
He also argued that DeLuna's trial judge improperly talked the suspect out of representing himself in appeals.
DeLuna's victim was attacked minutes after telephoning police in an attempt to describe her assailant to the dispatcher. Her conversation with her attacker and her final words were recorded by police.
'You want it (money). I'll give it to you. I'll give it to you. I'm not going to do nothing to you. Please ...,' Lopez is heard to say.
DeLuna has said another man stabbed Lopez to death, but investigators never found evidence of a second man being involved in the crime.
DeLuna won a stay of a previous execution date in October 1986.
