Charles Nealy was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of Jiten Bhakta
According to court documents Charles Nealy and his accomplices would enter a store where he would shoot and kill Jiten Bhakta during a robbery. One of his accomplices would shoot and kill Vijay Patel
Charles Nealy would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Charles Nealy would be executed by lethal injection on March 20 2007
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When Was Charles Nealy Executed
Charles Nealy was executed on March 20 2007
Charles Nealy Case
Texas death row inmate Charles Anthony Nealy has been executed. Nealy had a history of robberies and was sent to the Texas death chamber this evening for a fatal shooting during a convenience store holdup in Dallas nearly 10 years ago. Charles Anthony Nealy, whose 43rd birthday would have been Friday, became the ninth condemned inmate executed this year in the nation’s most active capital punishment state.
Nealy had at least three earlier convictions for aggravated robbery plus an extensive juvenile record for shoplifting, burglary and theft. The Dallas man insisted he was in Oklahoma and not in Texas the night of Aug. 20, 1997, when an Expressway Mart just south of downtown Dallas was robbed of some $4,000 and the store owner and a clerk were gunned down.
In late appeals to the federal courts, lawyers for Nealy alleged prosecutor misconduct and false testimony led to Nealy’s conviction and death sentence. In November, Nealy won a reprieve from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals three days before he was scheduled to die. State courts subsequently rejected the claims. In the hours before he was scheduled to die, his lawyers also tried to raise claims in the federal courts that Nealy was mentally retarded and therefore ineligible for execution, but state attorneys said the attempt was improper and incorrect. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the appeal and denied a stay shortly after the 6 p.m. CDT scheduled execution time passed.
India-born store owner Jiten Bhakta, 25, was shot to death with a shotgun as he dozed in the store office. One of his employees, Vijay Patel, also 25, was fatally shot with a pistol. Nealy was convicted of Bhakta’s death. His nephew, Claude Nealy, 17 at the time of the slayings, is serving life in prison for Patel’s killing. Bhakta’s brother, who also was in the store at the time of the holdup, identified Charles Nealy as the robber with the shotgun and Claude Nealy was the man with the handgun.
A third man charged in the case, Reginald Mitchell, testified he was with the pair that evening and waited in a car as Nealy and his nephew went into the store. He said Charles Nealy admitted the slayings to him, explaining later that night the two men were shot because they refused to sell him a cigar known as “Blackie mounds.” Mitchell, who was sentenced to two years in prison, also testified Charles Nealy threatened to kill him if he told anyone about the robbery and shootings.
“There’s all kinds of weird stuff going on in this case,” Charles Nealy said last week from death row, denying any involvement in the shootings. He said he was in Ardmore, Okla., at the time of the slayings, picking up a relative’s truck. “There was plenty of evidence in the case,” said Jason January, a former Dallas County assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case. “I don’t have any doubt or I wouldn’t have prosecuted it.”
A grainy videotape image from a security camera at the store showed a man with a shotgun and another with a pistol taking money from a cash register and then grabbing a bottle of wine and a couple of six-packs of cold beer. “I wasn’t one of them.” Nealy said in an interview.
He acknowledged the prospect of execution was scary. “Since I’ve been here, my dad died, my stepdad died, my mother died, one of my friends commited suicide,” he said. “And I’m up here where people are dying, it seems, like every week. “Sometimes the Prozac just isn’t enough.”
Scheduled to die next is Vincent Gutierrez, 28, facing lethal injection March 28 for fatally shooting a 39-year-old Air Force captain, Jose Cobo, who was carjacked outside his San Antonio apartment 10 years ago. The following day, Roy Lee Pippin, 51, is set to die for the slayings of two men in Houston 13 years ago.