Lester Bower became the oldest prisoner executed by Texas in the modern era on Wednesday after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the 67-year-old’s last-day appeal.
Bower spent 31 years on death row after being convicted of killing four men at an aircraft hangar near Dallas in 1983. He has always maintained his innocence and had appeals pending for the vast majority of his three decades behind bars.
Six previous staysAfter six previous stays of execution, he finally ran out of options and was put to death with a lethal dose of the sedative pentobarbital at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, near Houston.
“Much has been written about this case, not all of it has been the truth,” Bower said in his final statement, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. “But the time is over and now it is time to move on. I want to thank my attorneys for all that they have done. They have afforded me the last quarter of a century.
“I would like to thank my wife, my daughters, family and friends for unwavering support, and all of the letters and well wishes over the years. Now it is time to pass on. I have fought the good fight, I held the faith. I am not going to say goodbye, I will simply say until we meet again. I love you very, very much. Thank you warden.”
Bower is the eighth Texas prisoner executed this year using compounded pentobarbital from an unknown source. Legal challenges and problems finding suitable drugs have restricted the death penalty’s application to all but five States in 2015. Only Texas and Missouri have carried out executions since Warren Hill died in Georgia on 27 January. Texas, though, has another four executions scheduled between 18 June and 6 October.
Since 1976, when capital punishment was reinstated in the U.S., nine prisoners have been on death row in Texas longer than Bower but only David Powell, executed in 2010 after 32 years, has been killed by the State after serving more time there.
Bower argued that he was innocent, that the duration of his stay amounted to cruel and unusual punishment that violated the U.S. Constitution and that jurors were improperly prevented from taking his previously unblemished character into account.
At the time of the crime, he was a married and college-educated chemicals salesman with two children and no criminal record. Prosecutors said he killed Bob Tate, Jerry Brown, Philip Good and Ronald Mayes while stealing an ultralight aircraft he had agreed to buy for about $4,500 (£3,000). They were shot in the head at close range.
No hard evidenceBower said he tried to keep his planned purchase of the aircraft a secret from his wife because she would have disapproved. He initially lied to investigators about his connection to it and the men. But there was no hard evidence linking him to the crime scene, the weapon was not recovered and witnesses came forward in later years who said that he had nothing to do with the murders.
In an interview with the Guardian last week, Bower said that the nature of the legal system meant it was very difficult for death row prisoners to earn a new trial or lesser punishment without strong evidence of innocence or serious prosecutorial misconduct, even if appeals and investigations raise questions about the fairness of the original trial.
Bower said prosecution claims at the original trial that his attorneys had since debunked have lingered all the same, casting an unfair shadow over his attempts to clear his name. “Once it gets in the record you can’t get it out. Like a bad case of termites, you just can’t get rid of it,” he said.
“I don’t think there’s anything that I can tell people other than that it’s been shown there are innocent people who are coming off death row all the time.” — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2015
