- 1
- 2
- 3
- next
- | single page
Reuters8:53 p.m. CDT, August 7, 2012
(Updates with execution, final words of inmate, attorney
comment)AUSTIN, Texas, Aug 7 (Reuters) - Texas executed a mentally
retarded convicted murderer on Tuesday after the U.S. Supreme
Court refused to intervene a decade after it banned executions
of such people as cruel and unusual punishment.Marvin Wilson, 54, was convicted of the November 1992 murder
of a 21-year-old police drug informant, Jerry Robert Williams,
and was sentenced to death in April 1994.
Wilson had challenged his execution as unconstitutional
under a 2002 Supreme Court ruling that banned executing mentally
retarded people but gave states some discretion in deciding who
qualified for protection.
"The application for stay of execution of sentence of death
presented to Justice Scalia and by him referred to the Court is
denied," the court said in an order earlier on Tuesday evening.
Justice Antonin Scalia handles emergency appeals from the
5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees Texas.
Wilson was pronounced dead at 6:27 p.m. local time,
