Quintin Jones, from 41 years, he was executed by the state of Texas on Wednesday night, breaking a break of 10 months in the application of the death penalty in the state .
Jones was executed for a murder he committed more than 20 years in 1999, Jones was convicted of killing ag olpes with a baseball bat his great-aunt Berthena Bryant, from 83 years, when she refused to give him $ 30 dollars for drugs, according to court documents. Jones was sentenced to the death penalty in 2001 in Tarrant County and has been on death row ever since.
The Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas issued several stays of executions in 2020 due to the COVID pandemic – 19 . Jones’s death is the first execution in the state since July 8, 2020 , .
Jones, who had 19 years when he committed that murder, no He denied committing it and was not asking to be forgiven for his crime, but said it changed his life in prison and he should not be executed. In a video posted by The New York Times last week , Jones asked Governor Gregg Abbott that “he would seek in his heart to grant me the pardon.”
In Opinion
Quintin Jones first wrote to Suleika Jaouad in 2012, when she was being treated for leukemia and he was on death row in Texas. “Today, I tell the story of our friendship in the hope that it will save his life,” Jaouad writes in her guest essay. https://t.co/nv6Hwemnuk pic.twitter.com/tTFZWJ51 gives
– The New York Times (@nytimes) May 10, 1267912
But on Tuesday, the Board of Pardons and Texas Parole recommended not granting him a clemency.
Abbott, a Republican, could have granted a pardon of 30 days, but the board’s opposition almost assured that the execution would continue, reported NBC News.
Jones’s case had gained renewed attention for another The reasons: some of his family members publicly supported his petition for pardon from the death penalty , writing that he “is sorry and has changed for the better” and that killing him “cannot bring her back ”.
In addition, the case required that the jury, by apply the death penalty, determined that Jones posed a “future dangerousness”, a concept which critics say is based on inaccurate and controversial scientific data, and could be clouded by racial bias. The request for clemency from Quintin Jones said he had a “non-violent history during his two decades of incarceration.”
Family members of Quintin Jones, from 30 years, they expected the United States Supreme Court or Governor Abbott spare his life or grant him a last-minute reprieve . But this did not happen.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice continued with the execution of Jones, which occurred just before 7 pm by lethal injection, in the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville , the Associated Press reported.
Governor Abbott has only toggle one death penalty sentence since he took office in 2015. In the past six years, Texas has executed more than 50 people, the last time in July, and also the last time a state carried out an execution during 2020.
The federal government under the Trump administration resumed executions during the pandemic .