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Thread: Jerome Butler - Texas Execution - April 21, 1990

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    Jerome Butler - Texas Execution - April 21, 1990




    Summary of Offense: Convicted for the 1986 robbery and execution-style slaying of Houston cabdriver

    Victim: Nathan Oakley

    Time of Death: 12:26 a.m.

    Manner of execution: Lethal Injection

    Last Meal: T-bone steak, four pieces of chicken (two breast and two legs), fresh corn and iced tea

    Final Statement: "I wish everybody a good life. Everything is O.K."

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    Cabbie's murderer is executed

    HUNTSVILLE - Career criminal Jerome Butler lived up to his promise early today and met his executioner on schedule.

    The Houston native, who told fellow prisoners he'd wait for them in hell, received a lethal injection of drugs shortly after midnight for the 1986 robbery and execution-style slaying of Houston cabdriver Nathan Oakley.

    Butler, 57, volunteered to die rather than see appeals drag on for years. After spending half of his life in New York and Texas prisons, he had vowed to sabotage any efforts by attorneys or others to thwart his execution. In the end, there were none.

    He was pronounced dead at 12:26 a.m., about five minutes after the injection.

    "I wish everybody a good life and things like that, and everything is OK," he said, raising his head off a gurney and nodding to prison chaplain Carroll Pickett.

    "All right," he said as the lethel fluid began coursing into the vein of one arm. He coughed deeply several times as his head jerked, then was still.

    Butler was the first Texas prisoner put to death this year and the 34th since the state resumed capital punishment in 1982. The last prisoner to volunteer for execution was Robert Streetman, who died in 1988.

    "I ain't never in my life seen anybody more ready to die," said Carl Kinnamon, another death row inmate from Harris County, whose cell was next to Butler's. "It's on account of his age he don't want to continue his appeals. He doesn't want to be among the walking dead.' At a sentencing hearing last month, Butler told state District Judge Ted Poe that if his death sentence were overturned on appeal and he was sentenced to life, by the time he was eligible for release he would be too old to leave prison.

    "I'm 57 now, and I'd be in my 70s when I got out," Butler said. "What am I supposed to do? Go live under a bridge?' Butler, nicknamed "Pork Chop" for one of his favorite foods, told fellow inmates he was going to hell when he died, Kinnamon said.

    "He said he'd wait for (the others) in hell," Kinnamon said.

    Harris County prosecutors and the state attorney general's office were prepared to halt the lethal injection should Butler change his mind about filing an appeal in the federal courts.

    Butler began his criminal career at age 14 as a gang leader. He spent 27 years behind bars over the past four decades, and once said the time he served in New York's Sing Sing penitentiary for robbery and attempted sexual assault made Texas prisons "look like a cakewalk.' After his release from Sing Sing in 1972, Butler headed for Houston and within five months had been charged with the murder of another Houston man, A.C. Johnson, who had been shot and stuffed in the trunk of his car.

    He served 10 years of a 30-year sentence for that offense, and when released in 1984 Butler was returned to New York to serve another year behind bars for violating terms of his parole there.

    By February 1985, he was back in Houston and in July 1986 was charged in Oakley's death. A witness watched him pump three shots into the back of the Sky Jack cabbie's head after Oakley picked him up at a convenience store. Butler was only two blocks from his home, according to court records.

    The witness followed Butler after he reached over the front seat of the cab, robbed Oakley of an estimated $300 and then ran toward his house.

    About 3:45 p.m. Friday, Butler left death row at the Ellis I Unit in Walker County for the 30-minute ride to the death chamber at the Huntsville "Walls" Unit.

    Prison spokesman Charles Brown said the convict spent most of his final day sleeping, smoking cigarettes and watching television. He had no visitors but talked briefly with a guard, a prison mailroom employee and fellow convict Clifton Russell. He ordered a final meal of a T-bone steak, four pieces of fried chicken, fried corn and iced tea.

    http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/ar...id=1990_698055

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