Texas executes 20th inmate this year

By MICHAEL GRACZYK

The Associated Press

HUNTSVILLE — A Death Row inmate convicted of fatally beating and shooting an East Texas man with a rifle in 1998 was executed Thursday as he recited Psalm 23.

In early appeals of his conviction, Khristian Oliver’s attorneys argued that Nacogdoches County jurors improperly took Bibles into deliberations without the knowledge of the trial judge. The jurors likened the rifle to a biblical iron object. In Numbers 35:16, a murderer who uses an iron object to kill "shall surely be put to death."

Oliver’s appeals attorney, David Dow, said there is nothing wrong with people taking their religious values into the jury room.

"But they must take great care to ensure that, in sentencing a murderer, they follow Texas law rather than religious law, and in this case, the jurors did not do so," he said.

But state and federal courts, including the Supreme Court, upheld Oliver’s conviction and death sentence.

Oliver’s lethal injection, the 20th this year in Texas, came after the Supreme Court rejected another, last-day appeal, and Gov. Rick Perry refused to stop the execution.

"I know you’re not going to get the closure you are looking for," Oliver told his victim’s children, who watched through a window a few feet from him. "I wish you the best."

He said he prayed for them "every day and every night" and offered them "only the warmest wishes."

Then after telling his parents, watching through an adjacent window, that he loved them, he began praying the Psalm: "The Lord is my shepherd. . ."

He got through several verses before the drugs began to take effect.

Oliver, 32, was pronounced dead at 6:18 p.m.

The crime

Oliver was condemned for the March 17, 1998, slaying of Joe Collins, 64. Collins interrupted a break-in at his rural home outside Nacogdoches by Oliver, then 20, and Benny Rubalcaba, 16. Rubalcaba’s 15-year-old brother, Lonny, and Oliver’s girlfriend were waiting in a pickup truck.

Collins was beaten so severely and so many times — and also shot five times — he was nearly unrecognizable when a neighbor found him dead in the front yard.

Testimony showed that Collins grabbed a rifle and shot Benny Rubalcaba in the leg. Oliver fired his pistol at Collins and then retrieved the man’s rifle and beat him with it.

One of the teenagers testified that he saw Oliver swinging the rifle at Collins.

Evidence showed that at least two of five shots that hit Collins came while he was on his back outside his house.

"We had a lot of evidence, a lot of DNA, a lot of testimony," said Tim James, the trial prosecutor.

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