May 20 (UPI) -- Texas executed a 49-year-old death row inmate for the gruesome murder of a grandmother during a robbery in 2012, making him the second person to be executed in the United States on Tuesday and the 18th person this year.
Matthew Lee Johnson was killed by lethal injection Tuesday evening at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice In Huntsville, located about 70 miles north of Houston. He was pronounced dead at 6:53 CDT, Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement.
Johnson was executed for killing Nancy Harris, 76, on the morning of May 20, 2012. Harris had just opened the Fina Whip-In convenience store in Garland, where she had been a longtime employee, when Johnson entered carrying a lighter and a plastic bottle of lighter fluid.
According to court documents, he poured the lighter fluid on Harris and robbed her of her rings and the store of two packs of cigarettes and money from the cash register. He then set her on fire, and stole a packet of candy on the way out. Harris would die five days later from her injuries.
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In his final words, he apologized to Harris' family and asked for their forgiveness.
"I never meant to hurt her," he said. "I pray that she's the first person that I see when I open my eyes, and I will spend eternity with her."
Paxton said Johnson had received "the justice punishment" for his crime.
"While nothing can restore the innocent life that was taken, he will never be able to hurt anyone again," the Republican attorney general said. "Vicious criminals must be held responsible for their actions, and I will never stop working to ensure that justice is done."
Johnson was arrested about an hour after setting Harris on fire and robbing the convenience store.
During the trial, Johnson testified he wanted to use the lighter fluid as a "scare tactic" and that he hadn't intended to set her on fire when he flicked the lighter in his hand that set her ablaze, according to court documents.
His defense argued that their client was intoxicated on drugs and alcohol during the crime.
They said he had been sexually abused and began smoking marijuana as a child and began abusing crack cocaine as an adult.
The night before the crime, he had been drinking at a wedding reception, which he left at about midnight and bought some crack. Between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. he smoked 10 rocks of crack, then took a Xanax. At 6 a.m., he drank a bottle of red wine.
He went to the convenience store in order to rob it to buy more drugs, they said.
Johnson filed several appeals after being sentenced to death, but all were rejected.
On Sunday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit rejected his request for a stay of execution.
The Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty on Tuesday said Johnson had filed a clemency application asking the state to commute his death sentence to a lesser sentence as the jury handed down the death penalty on the grounds he would be dangerous in the future.
"This drug addiction plagued Johnson for most of his life in the free world and caused him to become a different person," the organization said in a statement. "Removed from any access to cocaine during his 12 years of incarceration on death row, Johnson has not been a threat to anyone."
He is the fourth person to be executed in Texas this year and the second person to be executed in the United States on Tuesday.
Just after midnight, Indiana killed Benjamin Donnie Ritchie by lethal injection for fatally shooting a police officer in 2000.
There have been 18 executions in the United States so far this year.
Oscar Smith is scheduled to be executed in Tennessee at 10 a.m. CDT Thursday.
