Man who stabbed young twin girls to death executed

A Texas man has been executed for fatally stabbing twin girls in 1989. Garcia White, convicted of killing teenagers Annette and Burnette Edwards, is the sixth person to be executed in the United States in the last 11 days.

A Texas man convicted of fatally stabbing 16-year-old twin girls more than three decades ago was executed on Tuesday evening, The Guardian reports.

Garcia Glenn White was pronounced dead at 18:56 GMT after being injected with a chemical substance at the state prison in Huntsville. He was convicted of the murders of Annette and Burnette Edwards in December 1989. The bodies of twin girls and their mother Bonita Edwards were found in their Houston apartment.

As noted, 61-year-old White became the sixth person executed in the United States over the past 11 days. His execution came after the US Supreme Court rejected requests to intervene without comment.

While awaiting execution, White apologized in his last words to the witnesses watching.

“I would like to apologize for all the evil I've done and the pain I've caused,” he said from death row shortly before the chemicals began flowing.

Testimony showed that White went to the girls' home in Houston to smoke crack with their mother, Bonita, who was also fatally shot. When the girls came out of their room to see what had happened, White attacked them. Evidence showed that White forced the girls' locked bedroom door. Authorities said he was later linked to the deaths of a grocery store owner and another woman.

“Garcia Glenn White committed five murders in three different operations, and two of his victims were teenage girls. These are the type of cases for which the death penalty was intended,” said Josh Reiss, chief of the post-conviction litigation unit at the Harris County district attorney's office in Houston, in comments before the execution.

White's lawyers unsuccessfully asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the execution after lower courts previously rejected motions to stay the execution. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Friday rejected White's request to commute his death sentence to a lesser sentence or grant him a 30-day reprieve.

His lawyers argued that Texas's highest criminal appeals court refused to "admit medical evidence and compelling factual evidence" showing White is mentally retarded.

In 2002, the Supreme Court banned the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. But it gave states some discretion in deciding how to define such violations. Judges debated for a long time how much discretion they should be given.

White's lawyers also faulted the Texas appeals court for preventing his defense from presenting evidence that could have spared him the death sentence, including DNA evidence suggesting another man was also at the crime scene and scientific evidence that would show that White "probably suffered from a cocaine-induced psychotic break during his incarcerated actions."

White's lawyers also argued that he is entitled to a new review of his death sentence, arguing that the Texas appeals court has developed a new sentencing framework for death penalty cases following the Supreme Court's recent decision in another Texas death penalty case.

Patrick McCann, one of White's lawyers, said Tuesday that his client has spent his time in prison "working to become a better man."

Attorneys for the federal public defender's office for the Western District of Texas also filed a petition with the Supreme Court asking for a delay in the trial and arguing that White was punished because McCann had previously failed to timely file an appeal over his mental retardation issue. McCann said he was focused on doing “the best I can” for White and “wasn’t going to waste what little time I have arguing with other lawyers.”

In a filing with the Supreme Court, the Texas Attorney General's Office said White failed to present evidence to support his claim of mental retardation. It also said his claims that there was evidence of another person at the crime scene and that cocaine use influenced his actions had previously been rejected by the courts.

The deaths of the twin girls and their mother remained unsolved for about six years until White confessed to the murders after he was arrested in connection with the July 1995 death of grocery store owner Huy Van Pham, who was fatally beaten during a robbery of his store. Police said White also admitted to fatally beating another woman, Greta Williams, in 1989.