17 May 2007 :

Kansas prison escapee was executed for fatally shooting a sheriff's deputy who was trying to pull him over for stealing $22.50 worth of gasoline from a service station.
Charles Edward Smith did not make a final statement. He was pronounced dead at 6:41 p.m., 11 minutes after the lethal drugs began to flow. The execution had been delayed slightly because of difficulty finding veins for the needles carrying the drugs.
For a moment, Smith glanced through a window at friends and relatives of slain Pecos County Deputy Tim Hudson.
``I'm glad he didn't say anything negative,'' said Hudson's daughter, Gwynn Hudson Simmons. ``You wait on something 18 years that should have been done years ago, it's just the right thing to have happen.''
Smith, 41, and a cousin, Carroll Smith, had fled from a minimum security prison in Kansas, five days before the Aug. 19, 1988, slaying of 61-year-old Hudson. Charles Smith had served about a year of a one- to five-year sentence for burglary, theft and aiding a felony.
After escaping, Charles Smith, a native of San Bernardino, Calif., and Carroll Smith, of Houston, stole a truck and headed for Texas.
The pair got gasoline in West Texas and drove off without paying. When Hudson tried to pull them over, Charles Smith opened fire. The shooting prompted an extensive hunt across West Texas that ended with a police chase and shootout.
Smith's defense was that the slaying was unintentional.
His cousin agreed to a life prison term and remains behind bars.
Smith was the 14th condemned killer to receive lethal injection this year in Texas, the nation's busiest capital punishment state.