Charles Smith was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of a police officer
According to court documents Charles Smith and an accomplice escaped from a prison in Kansas. The two would steal gas and would be approached by Pecos County Deputy Sheriff Tim Hudson. Smith would open fire hitting the Officer and killing him
Charles Smith would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Charles Smith would be executed by lethal injection on May 16 2007
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When Was Charles Smith Executed
Charles Smith was executed on May 16 2007
Charles Smith Case
Almost two decades after he and a cousin escaped from a Kansas prison and fled to Texas where they committed a string of thefts and burglaries, Charles Edward Smith was executed for gunning down a West Texas sheriff’s deputy who tried to pull them over for not paying for a tank of gas.
Smith, 41, replied with a curt “No, sir,” when asked by the warden if he had a final statement from the death chamber gurney before the lethal drugs were administered. Eleven minutes later, at 6:41 p.m. CDT, he was pronounced dead, making him the 14th inmate executed this year in the nation’s most active capital punishment state.
The U.S. Supreme Court refused Monday to review his case and no subsequent appeals were filed to try to halt the lethal injection. “He won’t kill anyone else. We can guarantee that 100 percent,” Gwynn Hudson Simmons said after watching Smith die. Simmons’ father, Tim Hudson, was the Pecos County sheriff’s deputy fatally wounded by Smith in August 1988. “When you have somebody who showed no remorse and actually bragged about killing a police officer, … what can be said? I had no desire to talk to him and I don’t think there was anything he could have said to me to make any difference.”
Smith and a cousin, Carroll Smith, had fled from a minimum-security prison in Shawnee County, Kan., five days before the slaying. Charles Smith had served about a year of a one- to five-year sentence for burglary, theft and aiding a felony. His cousin was serving seven to 25 years for burglary, theft and criminal damage to property.
Charles Smith, a native of San Bernardino, Calif., and Carroll Smith, from Houston, reached Houston in a stolen truck and broke into several houses, stealing money, credit cards and other items, including the .357-caliber Magnum pistol evidence showed was the weapon used to kill Hudson.
They replaced their truck with a stolen van, got $22.50 worth of gas in Bakersfield in West Texas and drove off without paying. When Hudson tried to pull them over about 30 minutes later on Interstate 10 near Fort Stockton, Charles Smith opened fire. One of the shots went through Hudson’s arm and into the deputy’s chest, fatally wounding him.
Evidence showed Hudson, a career lawman nearing retirement, apparently didn’t know the men in the van were escapees. He never drew his gun and had just radioed the license plate number to a dispatcher. The shooting prompted an extensive hunt for the deputy’s killers across West Texas that ended with a wild police chase and shootout.
Smith was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. In 1992, his conviction was thrown out by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which ruled the trial judge improperly denied a challenge from Smith’s lawyer during jury selection. In 1995, the same appeals court threw out a second death sentence for improper jury instructions. Four years later, he was sentenced to die a third time.
He declined from death row to speak with reporters in the weeks preceding his scheduled execution. “He got good hearings over the years and escaped execution,” J.K. Wall, Charles Smith’s appeals lawyer, said Wednesday. “He’s had some appellate success but unfortunately he just run out of issues.”
Smith’s original Kansas conviction stemmed from a burglary where he and a companion stole a rifle that was used in a killing in Garden City, Kan.
Jailers from Pecos County testified at his trial they remembered Smith for singing the 1970s Eric Clapton rock song “I Shot the Sheriff” and amending the words to say, “But in my case it was the deputy.” He told a fellow jail inmate the cop killing fulfilled a lifetime goal.
His cousin agreed to a life prison term and remains behind bars. At least a dozen other condemned inmates have execution dates in Texas in the coming months, five of them in June.
