HUNTSVILLE (AP) – A 66-year-old Texas prisoner accused of four killings and at least nine rapes has been executed for a 1979 rape and murder in Houston that went unsolved for two decades until he confessed.
Danny Paul Bible received lethal injection Wednesday evening for the death of 20-year-old Inez Deaton, whose body was found on the banks of a Houston bayou.
Bible’s attorneys had argued to the courts that his multiple health issues made it likely his punishment would be botched and cause him unconstitutional pain. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a last-day appeal about an hour before he was put to death.
There were no apparent complications during the execution Wednesday.
Bible’s guilt was not disputed, but his lawyers had proposed he be rolled in his wheelchair in front of a firing squad or be administered nitrogen gas to cut off oxygen to his brain. State attorneys said neither of those alternatives was possible or legal.
The execution was the seventh this year in Texas, the country’s most active death penalty state.
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