A man has been put to death for the 2005 fatal shooting of three people during an attempted robbery at his neighbor's home in rural Texas, the state's fifth execution this year, the AP reports. LeJames Norman, 40, was put to death by lethal injection Wednesday at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. He'd been sentenced to death in the fatal shootings of Samuel Roberts, 24, Tiffani Peacock, 18, and Celso Lopez, 38, inside the home they shared in Edna, located about 100 miles southwest of Houston. Ker'Sean Ramey was also convicted in the shootings and sentenced to death. His execution is set for next week.
Court records indicated Norman and Ramey believed there was cocaine in the house and hoped to steal it, but they never found any drugs. Norman was arrested about five months after the killings while trying to cross back into the US from Mexico. Norman pleaded guilty to capital murder, leaving a jury to decide his punishment. The US Supreme Court denied a request on Wednesday from Norman's attorneys to stop his execution. Asked by the warden if he wanted to make a final statement, Norman shook his head. He was laying on a thin mattress atop a steel table, his head on a white pillow. He nodded toward a window through which a sister, two of his children, and a friend watched and made eye contact as one of them danced.
In Georgia, the execution of a man who killed two real estate agents had also been scheduled for Wednesday but was halted by a judge's late-night decision a day before he was scheduled to die. Stacey Humphreys, 53, was convicted of malice murder and other crimes in the 2003 killings of 33-year-old Cyndi Williams and 21-year-old Lori Brown in an Atlanta suburb. The judge halted the execution after his lawyers filed a petition seeking a resentencing under a new state law that allows victims of abuse to have their sentences reconsidered and reduced, if they can tie their crimes to abuse they suffered.
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