Khristian Oliver was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of Joe Collins
According to court documents Khristian Oliver and his teenage accomplices would break into a home. When the homeowner, Joe Collins, returned there was a gunfight and Collins was shot and killed
Khristian Oliver would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Khristian Oliver would be executed by lethal injection on November 5 2009
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When Was Khristian Oliver Executed
Khristian Oliver was executed on November 5 2009
Khristian Oliver Case
A man convicted for the 1998 beating and murder of a 64-year-old Nacogdoches man was put to death Thursday, marking the state’s 20th execution by lethal injection this year. Khristian Oliver, 32, was pronounced dead at 6:18 p.m., just eight minutes after the lethal dosage of drugs was introduced into his bloodstream.
Oliver was condemned for the March 1998 slaying of Joe Collins who interrupted the break-in at his rural home outside Nacogdoches, about 140 miles southeast of Dallas.
“I know you are not going to get the closure you are looking for,” Oliver said to the victim’s family. “I pray for ya’ll every day and every night. I have only the warmest wishes. “I am sorry for what you are having to go through.” After expressing love to his own family members, Oliver cited Psalm 23, “The Shepherd’s Prayer,” getting through several verses before being hushed by effects of the drugs. “The good Lord was on our side this time,” Collins’ son Joe Preston Collins Jr. said in a press conference following the execution. “There is closure, despite his sentiment.”
Despite accusations from attorneys that jurors consulted a Bible to justify his death sentence, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Oliver’s last-day appeal and Gov. Rick Perry refused to stop the punishment.
“I felt that it was more self-healing for him than for us,” Collins Jr. said. “He wanted us to feel better…but, you know, its kind of hard… we have been waiting 11 years. “He has been alive and well all this time and I have been without a dad,” he continued. “I looked and I didn’t see any remorse in his eyes. To me, he had a much easier death than my dad.”
State and federal courts, including the Supreme Court, earlier upheld Oliver’s conviction and death sentence, but Oliver’s attorney renewed his appeal to the high court and urged Perry to issue a rare one-time 30-day reprieve.
A witness to the attack on Collins, in which Oliver beat and shot him with a rifle, compared it to someone getting bashed with an ax or a golf club. Oliver’s lawyers argued that jurors who improperly brought Bibles with them into deliberations without the knowledge of the trial judge in Nacogdoches County likened the rifle to a biblical iron object.
Oliver’s lawyer, David Dow, said there was nothing wrong with people bringing their religious values into the jury room. “But they must take great care to insure 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.
At an evidentiary hearing, jurors gave various accounts, ranging from one Bible to several being present in the jury room. One testified they had them because they went to Bible study after court proceedings. Another said any reading from the books came after they reached a decision. A third said the reading of Scripture was intended to make them feel better about their decision. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said evidence was contradictory on whether jurors consulted the Bible before or after deliberations and that several jurors testified that the Bible “was not a focus of their discussions.”
Collins was hit so severely and so many times — and also was shot five times — he was nearly unrecognizable when a neighbor found him dead in the front yard of home.
Joe Collins Sr. had left home to pick up dinner on March 17, 1998, and returned to find Oliver, then 20, and 16-year-old Benny Rubalcaba inside his home. Rubalcaba’s 15-year-old brother, Lonny, and Oliver’s girlfriend were outside waiting in a pickup truck. As the two intruders tried to run away, testimony showed Collins grabbed a rifle and shot Benny Rubalcaba in the leg. Oliver fired his pistol at Collins, then retrieved the man’s rifle and beat him with it.
One of the teenagers testified he saw Oliver swinging the rifle at Collins. Evidence showed at least two of five shots to hit Collins came while he was on his back on the ground outside his house. Oliver was arrested in Houston with his girlfriend, Sonya Reed. She turned down a 10-year plea deal, went to trial and received 99 years in prison. Benny Rubalcaba got five years and his brother 10 years. Both are now out of prison.
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