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USA - Texas. Quintin Jones was executed
May 19, 2021: Quintin Jones was executed Wednesday, May 19, 2021, without media witnesses present because prison agency officials neglected to notify reporters it was time to carry out the punishment.
Jones, now 41, Black, received the lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville for the September 1999 killing of his 83-year-old great aunt Berthena Bryant. Prosecutors said after Bryant refused to lend Jones money, he beat her with a bat in her Fort Worth home then took $30 from her purse to buy drugs.
Jones had been sentenced to death in Tarrant County in 2001.
TDCJ spokesman Jeremy Desel never received the usual phone call from the Huntsville Unit prison to bring reporters from The Associated Press and The Huntsville Item to the prison. He and the media witnesses were waiting in an office across the street.
“The Texas Department of Criminal Justice can only apologize for this error and nothing like this will ever happen again,” he said.
He said the execution, the first in Texas in nearly a year, included a number of new personnel who have never participated in the process.
“Somewhere in that mix there was never a phone call made to this office for me to accompany the witnesses across the street into the Huntsville Unit,” Desel said.
Desel said he didn’t immediately know if the glitch was a violation of state law or a violation of agency policy.
The previous 570 executions carried out by Texas since capital punishment resumed in 1982 all had at least one media witness.
There were no unusual circumstances with the execution itself, he said, relying on accounts from agency officials who were inside the death chamber.
Jones made a brief statement thanking his supporters and expressing love for them.
As the lethal dose of pentobarbital was administered, he took four or five deep breaths followed by “a long deep snore,” Desel said.
Jones was pronounced dead at 6:40 p.m., 12 minutes after the drugs began.
Less than an hour before the scheduled punishment, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to halt the 41-year-old man’s execution.
Some of Bryant’s family members, including her sister Mattie Long, had said they didn’t want Jones to be executed. Jones was Long’s grandnephew.
Helena Faulkner, a Tarrant County assistant criminal district attorney whose office prosecuted Jones, said not all of Bryant’s family members had opposed the execution.
A petition called "Clemency for Quin" had collected more than 170,000 signatures prior to his execution.
Jones was the first inmate in Texas to receive a lethal injection since the July 8 execution of Billy Joe Wardlow. Four other executions had been set for earlier this year but were either delayed or rescheduled. While Texas is usually the nation’s busiest death penalty state, in 2020 it executed only three inmates — the fewest executions in nearly 25 years, mainly because of the pandemic.
Jones becomes the 1st executed this year in Texas, and the 571st executed in Texas since the state resumed executions in 1982. Jones is the 4th execution of 2021 in the United States, after 3 federal executions on January 13, 14 and 16, and No. 1,533 since the United States reintroduced the death penalty in 1976 and resumed executions in 1977.
https://apnews.com/article/texas-executions-lifestyle-747fc8994706df9dee9e64909c464b99 (Source: AP, HoC, 19/05/2021)
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