LAWFUEL – The Legal Newswire – Texas executed a convicted murderer on Tuesday by lethal injection, the same day the U.S. Supreme Court said it will decide whether that method violates a constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment, Reuters report.
Michael Richard, 49, was the 26th person put to death this year in Texas and the 405th since the state resumed the death penalty in 1982, six years after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a national ban on capital punishment.
Texas, which leads the nation in executions, has another scheduled for Thursday.
Prosecutors said Richard, who was on parole from prison, sexually assaulted and shot to death a 53-year-old nurse and mother of seven at her Houston-area home in August 1986.
Richard, who also stole two televisions and traded them for cocaine, confessed to the crime but said the gun went off accidentally.
