Michael Richard was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of Marguerite Dixon
According to court documents Michel Richard would enter the home of Marguerite Dixon who would be sexually assaulted and murdered. Richard would rob the home before fleeing
Michael Richard would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Michael Richard would be executed by lethal injection on September 25 2007
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When Was Michael Richard Executed
Michael Richard was executed on September 25 2007
Michael Richard Case
More than two decades after a mother of seven was attacked and killed inside her Harris County home, the man convicted of her slaying was executed Tuesday evening.
Asked if he’d like to make a final statement, Michael Richard said, “I’d like my family to take care of each other. I love you, Angel. Let’s ride.” Several seconds later, after the lethal drugs started, Richard blurted out, “I guess this is it.” He then gasped and snorted several times and was pronounced dead at 8:23 p.m., nine minutes after the lethal drugs began to flow.
Richard, 49, had at least five felony convictions and had been released from his second prison term just eight weeks before the 1986 murder of Marguerite Lucille Dixon. He was the 26th Texas inmate executed this year. The execution was delayed about two hours while appeals were in the courts.
“It means in this particular case, the system worked, it was thorough,” Stephen Dixon, whose mother was killed in the attack, said after watching Richard die. “The person executed deserved what he got.” Dixon said he wasn’t too concerned with the delays. “I was told to expect such things,” he said. “It’s been a long 21 years.”
Dixon’s 53-year-old mother, who worked as a nurse, had offered Richard a drink of water after he came up to her house and inquired whether a van parked outside was for sale. The vehicle wasn’t and Richard left, noticing that two of Dixon’s children who were home at the time left shortly after he did. Evidence showed he returned, raped the woman, fatally shot her, then stole two televisions and drove off in the van.
The U.S. Supreme Court turned down requests to halt the execution because of claims Richard was mentally retarded. Attorneys then asked for a reprieve because of the high court’s decision earlier Tuesday to consider the constitutionality of lethal injection in a Kentucky case. Almost two hours later, the Supreme Court rejected the appeal. Gov. Rick Perry’s office had said Richard’s execution should go forward as planned.
Richard acknowledged being at Dixon’s home in Hockley, in far northwest Harris County, accounting for his fingerprint on a sliding glass door. But he insisted he wasn’t responsible for the woman’s death. “I did things in my life I deserved to be locked up for,” he said last week from death row. “But I didn’t kill anybody. “I went by that house, true enough, asked to buy a car, and I left.”
The van was found abandoned in Houston, about 30 miles to the southeast, and Richard later took officers to where he gave the .25-caliber pistol used in Dixon’s death to a friend. Evidence showed he swapped the TVs for some cocaine. Richard’s lawyers argued he was mentally retarded and not eligible for lethal injection under a U.S. Supreme Court order barring execution of mentally retarded people.
Two of Dixon’s children found a sliding glass door open and the house dark and ransacked when they returned and found their mother’s body in her bed and covered with paper and clothing. The fingerprint on the glass door led police to Richard, who confessed the shooting was an accident. From prison, he said the confession wasn’t his.
“It really surprises me something has not been done in this case to bring some finality,” Lee Coffee, who prosecuted Richard in 1987, said. “Either carry out the punishment or some court conclude he should not be subject to the death penalty, but something should have been resolved many years ago. “This is one of the things why the general public is frustrated with the criminal justice system,” said Coffee, who is now a judge in Memphis, Tenn.
Richard was convicted and sentenced to death in 1987. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals threw out his conviction in 1992 because jurors improperly were not allowed to consider evidence that as a child Richard had been abused. In 1995, a second jury convicted him again and again sentenced him to die.
At least one psychological assessment of Richard two years ago put his IQ at 64, well under the 70 considered the threshold of retardation. In March, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed a judge’s finding that Richard was not mentally retarded and his execution date. “I’ve been here forever,” Richard said from death row, where he is known as “Louisiana Red.” “I just try to live for every day. Everybody’s going to die. I just know the date.”
Richard first went to prison in 1978 with a six-year term for burglary. He was paroled about three years later, then returned to prison in 1985 with a five-year sentence for theft and forgery. He was released on mandatory supervision after 17 months. Dixon’s slaying occurred eight weeks later. He was the first of two Texas inmates scheduled to die this week. On Thursday, a Dallas man, Carlton Turner, 28, is set to die for killing his parents in 1998.