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Thread: Robert Lynn Pruett - Texas Execution - October 12, 2017

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    Robert Lynn Pruett - Texas Execution - October 12, 2017


    Officer Daniel Nagle




    Summary of Offense:

    On December 17, 1999, Pruett physically assaulted a male correctional officer, Daniel Nagle, at the McConnell Unit in Bee County, resulting in his death.

    Pruett was sentenced to death in April 2002.

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    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    On September 9, 2010, Pruett filed an appeal in the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit over the denial of his habeas petition by the Federal District Court.

    http://dockets.justia.com/docket/cir.../ca5/10-70024/

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    2 condemned Texas killers lose appeals

    A federal appeals court has refused appeals from two Texas death row inmates, including one condemned for killing a corrections officer 12 years ago while already serving a life sentence for murder.

    The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected arguments from 32-year-old Robert Pruett and 39-year-old Bobby Lee Hines.
    Pruett in December 1999 was at the McConnell Unit prison near Beeville in South Texas, serving 99 years for a slaying in Harris County, when he used a shank to fatally stab a corrections officer.

    Hines was condemned for the 1991 death of a 26-year-old woman at her Dallas apartment. He was 19 at the time and on probation from a 10-year burglary sentence after spending three months in a boot camp.

    http://www.khou.com/news/local/2-con...136310983.html

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    In today's United States Supreme Court orders, Pruett's petition for writ of certiorari was DENIED.

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    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Pruett’s execution set for May 21

    Most of those in the courtroom Monday morning were armed security personnel when Texas Department of Criminal Justice correctional officers walked in with Robert Lynn Pruett.

    Senior District Judge Ronald Yeager sat on the bench, presiding over the 156th District Court. Yeager was only minutes away from telling Pruett he was scheduling his execution by lethal injection for May 21.

    Pruett turned 33 in September and has been on death row since he was convicted in a Corpus Christi courtroom on April 30, 2002, of murdering 37-year-old Daniel Nagle.

    Nagle had been discovered, lying in his own blood, near a multipurpose room in the William G. McConnell maximum security unit in Bee County on Dec. 17, 1999. He had been stabbed repeatedly with an inmate-made “shank,” a steel bar sharpened on one end and wrapped with cloth on the other end.

    Nagle was the first, and only, correctional officer to be murdered inside one of the three TDCJ prisons in Bee County.

    It did not take investigators long to single out Pruett. The 20-year-old inmate was serving a life sentence for a murder in which he had been involved with his father and older brother at a trailer park in Houston. And Nagle had told Pruett he was going to write him up for violating one of the prison’s rules.

    “It sounds like they have overwhelming evidence against me,” the prisoner told Yeager Monday. He knew that testimony from fellow McConnell Unit inmates and DNA evidence found on his clothing had sealed his fate.

    Pruett was surrounded by five correctional officers, two Bee County deputies and two court bailiffs as he sat with his defense attorney, Richard Rogers III of Corpus Christi. At the other table, state prosecutor Mark Edwards sat as Yeager went over the documents before him on the bench.

    In the audience sat TDCJ’s Region IV Director Eileen Kennedy and several other prison officials.

    Bailiff Bill Lazenby had blocked off access to the stairway leading to the second floor where the hearing was held. There were no spectators in the courtroom from the general public.

    Pruett spoke briefly to Yeager, saying that researchers from the University of Houston had reported that they had uncovered some evidence that could exonerate him. But he did not say what that evidence was.

    The defendant said it appeared that prosecutors “basically cheated to get an advantage” in his April 2002 trial in Corpus Christi.

    Pruett asked the judge to give him “a month or so, just a little more time.”

    Rogers requested that the execution date be scheduled for sometime after August. He mentioned the search for evidence but declined to comment on it because he was not involved in that effort.

    Yeager said he had been told that the state was asking for a May 21 execution date. The judge told Pruett and Rogers that he was going to overrule their request for a later execution date and scheduled the event for the requested date.

    Yeager told Pruett and Rogers that would give them time to bring any new evidence to the court. He reminded them that all avenues of appeal had been exhausted at both the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and United States Supreme Court.

    Yeager then ordered that Pruett be taken to the TDCJ’s Death Chamber on May 21 and that he be given an intravenous injection “sufficient to cause death until Robert Lynn Pruett is dead.”

    Pruett appears to be a poster boy for the state’s death penalty. He was just weeks shy of his 16th birthday when, on Aug. 9, 1995, he and his brother allegedly held down a resident of the trailer park where they lived in Houston while their father stabbed the man to death.

    All three of them were sentenced to life in prison. Robert Pruett began serving his life sentence in October 1995, only weeks after the murder. He had just turned 16.

    At the time, TDCJ officials were saying he was considered the youngest inmate in Texas’ adult prison system.

    According to an executive summary of Nagle’s murder, written by the TDCJ’s Institutional Division, Pruett had tried to take a sack lunch to the recreation yard on the day Nagle was killed. The meal was supposed to have been eaten in his cell.

    Nagle told Pruett that he was going to write a disciplinary report on the incident. Then the inmate was allowed into the recreation yard.

    The report indicated that Pruett argued with Nagle over the report and the inmate ended up grabbing the report the officer had written. Pruett then ran toward a restroom adjacent to the multipurpose room where Nagle’s body was found.

    When Nagle followed Pruett into the area, Pruett apparently attacked the officer with the 6- to 8-inch weapon, stabbing him numerous times.

    Nagle’s body was discovered at 3:30 p.m., possibly 15 minutes after the attack. He was pronounced dead at 3:55 p.m.

    Medical examiners found multiple stab wounds to the victim’s head, neck, arms and upper body. It was later determined that the officer died of a heart attack as he was being stabbed.

    A number of changes in TDCJ officers’ prison routines were approved following the murder.

    If he is executed, Pruett will be the second inmate to die for attacking someone at the McConnell Unit while serving a life sentence for murder.

    McConnell Unit inmate Rogelio Cannady was executed on May 19, 2010, for killing his cell mate during an attack on Oct. 10, 1993.

    Cannady was serving two life sentences and a 20-year sentence for robbery for his part in the murder of two teenagers, a 16-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl who had run away from a youth home.

    Cannady was 37 when he was executed.

    http://www.mysoutex.com/pages/full_s...es_left_column
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

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    Administrator Michael's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Heidi View Post
    Pruett’s execution set for May 21
    If he is executed, Pruett will be the second inmate to die for attacking someone at the McConnell Unit while serving a life sentence for murder.
    http://www.mysoutex.com/pages/full_s...es_left_column
    Another one for the list why LWOP isn´t the correct punishment for every crime/criminal.
    No murder can be so cruel that there are not still useful imbeciles who do gloss over the murderer and apologize.

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    Senior Member Member chris35721's Avatar
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    Being a x correctional guard, been waiting for this one.

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    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    New York Times/Texas Tribune article

    Scheduled Execution Revives Debate Over Prison Staffing

    In December 1999, Daniel Nagle, a corrections officer, stood on the Texas Capitol steps, leading a rally to ask lawmakers for a pay raise for his fellow prison employees. His union had been at odds with the prison administration for months over whether a staffing shortage was compromising safety.

    “Someone will have to be killed,” he said at the rally, “before the Texas Department of Criminal Justice does anything about the shortage of staff in Texas prisons.”

    Two weeks later, Mr. Nagle was fatally stabbed by an inmate while working at the McConnell Unit in Beeville. “There was nobody there to call for help,” said Della Nagle, his sister. “It was just him and the inmates.” Officials of the prison-workers’ union, a chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, including Mr. Nagle’s former colleagues, said that understaffing and low pay continued to put officers in danger today. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which runs the state’s prisons, counters that all of its critical security positions are filled. And the inmate convicted of Mr. Nagle’s murder says the staffing issues created a situation that was ripe for corruption and led to his being framed.

    Robert Pruett was 22 when he was convicted in 2002 of Mr. Nagle’s killing; he is scheduled to be executed on May 21. In an interview this month, he maintained his innocence and said that inmates and corrupt officers had colluded to blame him for the murder. Prosecutors convinced a jury that Mr. Pruett had murdered Mr. Nagle after a dispute over a disciplinary write-up.

    “I was easy to blame,” said Mr. Pruett, who had been serving a 99-year sentence for being an accomplice in the murder of a neighbor by his father.

    Lance Lowry, president of the union, said Mr. Pruett’s forthcoming execution made clear the ways staffing shortages had a negative impact on security.

    The number of inmates in Texas prisons more than doubled between 1990 and 1999. According to Criminal Justice Department statistics, assaults on staff members at Texas prisons deemed “serious” have risen in recent years, to 96 in 2012 from 72 in 2010. Last year was also a 10-year high for deaths of inmates at the hands of other inmates — there were 11 — although other statistics, including the confiscation of fewer weapons and a decrease in assaults among inmates, suggest that violence is down. The last time an officer was killed by an inmate was in 2007.

    John Hurt, a Criminal Justice spokesman, said that the department was running with a staffing shortage but that all “critical security positions are filled.” He said that since Mr. Nagle’s death the department had put new measures into effect, including the use of body alarms, video surveillance systems and stab-resistant vests.

    Union leaders and prison officials agree that the shortage in certain parts of the state is partly because of the growth of the oil and gas industry in South Texas and East Texas, which has created private-sector jobs that compete with prisons for workers.

    “They can go out and drive a truck for twice as much as they’d make in the prison,” Mr. Lowry said.

    To reverse the trend, prison officials offered a $3,000 bonus last year to new correction officers in certain units in which the oil and gas boom had created the most competitive hiring environment. They are working with state lawmakers to include a 5 percent pay increase for corrections officers in the budget, which would cost taxpayers $105.2 million. “We’re never going to be able to compete financially with the private sector,” Mr. Hurt said.

    But Mr. Lowry says the current proposals are insufficient.

    “I think Daniel was right,” he said. “It’s going to take more people getting killed.”

    In the death of Mr. Nagle, the absence of other guards nearby meant that the only witnesses were inmates. Mr. Pruett said his lawyers could not adequately investigate the theory that inmates were bought off by prison officials to testify against him. Although he conceded that his suggestions sounded like a conspiracy theory, he said that further investigation would find evidence of deals between inmates and guards to frame him.

    At Mr. Pruett’s 2002 trial, prosecutors told a Corpus Christi jury that Mr. Nagle had told Mr. Pruett he could not eat a sandwich in the recreation area and then filed a disciplinary report. They said that Mr. Pruett returned that afternoon and stabbed Mr. Nagle with a sharpened metal rod. The report was found near Mr. Nagle’s body.

    No biological evidence tied Mr. Pruett directly to the crime scene, and inmates who said they witnessed the crime offered conflicting testimony.

    At the trial, Mr. Pruett’s lawyer suggested that Mr. Nagle might have reported the names of officers who cooperated with prison gangs to smuggle drugs into the facility to internal investigators, and that that would have been a motive for corrupt officers and inmates to have Mr. Nagle killed.

    Thomas Prasifka, then the warden of the McConnell Unit, said that Mr. Nagle was not formally involved in a corruption investigation but might have provided the names. The judge called the whole matter “nothing more than speculation.”

    In February of this year, federal officials indicted 17 corrections officers on charges of smuggling cellphones into the McConnell Unit, which were used by gang leaders to organize criminal activities outside the prison. Federal officials referred in their indictment to a “culture of corruption” in the unit.

    “This is 13 years after, and they are still corrupt over there,” Mr. Pruett said.

    Mr. Lowry and Mr. Hurt both acknowledged that there had been corruption among officers at the unit. Mr. Lowry said that was a result of high turnover among officers. “You get these employees in there, and they have no intent on staying,” he said. “It allows corruption to flourish.”

    Brian Olsen, the executive director of the union, said of the killing: “We always thought it might be a hit related to the information Nagle was giving. We don’t know that for sure.”

    Mr. Olsen asserted that the problems of corruption and violence in Texas prisons would be greatly reduced by increasing pay and solving staffing shortages. He said Mr. Nagle’s 1999 speech was still a major inspiration as he continued to lobby and that little had changed.

    “We’re back to that point,” he said.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/us...anted=all&_r=0
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

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    Execution for Prison Guard Murder Delayed for DNA Tests

    By Maurice Chammah
    The Texas Tribune

    State lawyers agreed Thursday to a 60-day reprieve for death row inmate Robert Pruett, who was scheduled for execution May 21, after the inmate filed a request for DNA testing, arguing it may prove his innocence in the 1999 stabbing of prison correctional officer Daniel Nagle.

    Pruett, 33, was convicted in 2002 of Nagle’s killing and maintains that inmates and corrupt officers colluded to implicate him. A jury found Pruett guilty after prosecutors argued that he murdered Nagle after a dispute over a disciplinary write-up. Prosecutors told jurors that Pruett — who was already serving a life sentence for another murder he allegedly participated in with his father — killed Nagle because the inmate was upset that he had written him up for taking a sack lunch into the recreation yard at the McConnell Unit in Beeville.

    That write-up is the subject of the DNA request. A palm print was found on the report that did not match Pruett. The Texas Department of Public Safety currently maintains a database of palm prints, but it did not exist in 2002.

    "Since 2002, the science of touch DNA has developed, and prints left on pieces of evidence are routinely tested for DNA," Pruett's lawyer David Dow, who teaches at the University of Houston Law Center, wrote in the request for testing. "The State’s scientists that examined the disciplinary report did not utilize this technology, which was still in its infancy at
    the time of trial."

    Pruett believes that someone else tore up the disciplinary report and spread the pieces near Nagle’s body in an attempt to frame him for the murder, Dow wrote. He added that no guards witnessed the murder and that the inmates who testified about witnessing the murder may have been unreliable.

    "Many of these inmates, when first questioned soon after Nagle’s murder, claimed to have no knowledge of the crime or that Pruett had nothing to do with the murder," Dow wrote, "but changed their story over the course of the next year, only after being promised favors or something of value by the prosecution."

    Alfred Hernandez, a prosecutor for the Special Prosecution Unit, which focuses on prison crimes, told the jury at the 2002 trial that the theory that investigators framed Pruett was ridiculous. "Can you think of a reason we would pick on Robert Pruett if he didn't do it? I mean, we could have found people with a worse record," he said. "We could have found people who had much more dangerous looks instead of someone who looks like a little kid."

    In a letter published online Pruett said that further investigation would lead more inmates who were at the McConnell Unit at the time to divulge more information about who killed Nagle, but that in the wake of the murder "everyone kept their mouths shut because the people responsible for Nagle’s death are extremely dangerous and would no doubt retaliate." Pruett has extensively written about the case in an autobiography.

    John Gilmore, a lawyer who represented Pruett at the trial, said in an interview last month that he attempted to look for evidence of corruption but "kind of hit a dead end on that option."

    "I don’t remember ever getting anything concrete we could get before a jury," he said.

    Special prosecutor Mark Edwards said he had no comment on what he expects the DNA testing to produce, but the state is not objecting to the testing and is allowing a 60-day reprieve.

    Nagle was the leader of the local prison workers' union, a chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Shortly before his death, he stood on the Texas Capitol steps, leading a rally to ask lawmakers for a pay raise for his fellow prison employees, arguing that chronic understaffing was jeopardizing officer safety.

    "When a guy is working by himself, this can happen," union director Brian Olsen told the Texas Tribune last month. He has been calling on the Texas Legislature to approve a pay raise that he hopes will decrease turnover among staff, which jeopardizes security.

    Since the murder, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has instituted new safety measures, including body alarms, video surveillance systems and stab-resistant vests, and spokeman John Hurt said that all critical staffing positions are currently filled.

    http://www.texastribune.org/2013/05/...-pending-dna-/

  10. #10
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Every single one of them is going to request DNA testing.
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

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