Cedric Ransom was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of Herbert Primm
According to court documents Herbert Primm was an optometrist by trade but also a licensed gun dealer. Cedric Ransom and accomplices would go to the Primm residence and when Herbert was showing the guns to one of the accomplices the others hid. Suddenly Cedric would pull a gun and fatally shoot Herbert Primm
Cedric Ransom would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
During his trial Cedric Ransom would attack the prosecutor and his own lawyer with a smuggled knife
Cedric Ransom would be executed by lethal injection on July 23 2003
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When Was Cedric Ransom Executed
Cedric Ransom was executed on July 23 2003
Cedric Ransom Case
A Fort Worth man who attacked one of his own attorneys and a prosecutor during his capital murder trial was executed Wednesday evening for robbing and fatally shooting a gun dealer, one of four slayings authorities linked him to during a 17-day period in 1991.
In a brief final statement, Cedric Ransom thanked a friend and a spiritual adviser who were present to watch him die. “You have been beautiful to me. Without you in my life, I would not have been able to make it like this. Probably I would have put up a good fight. You have calmed me,” he said. Ransom told them he loved them. As the lethal drugs began taking effect, he told them, “I’ll be OK.” He gasped a couple of times, exhaled and stopped breathing. Nine minutes later, at 6:21 p.m., he was pronounced dead.
Ransom, 29, was the 19th Texas inmate executed this year and the first of two on consecutive nights this week.
“He was a bad guy,” said Richard Bland, one of the Tarrant County prosecutors who tried Ransom’s case. Besides the Dec. 7, 1991, slaying of optometrist and part-time gun dealer Herbert Primm, Bland said, Ransom was involved in three fatal robberies of convenience stores. “Most people go to an ATM to get cash,” Bland said. “He’d go to convenience stores and not leave any witnesses.”
In late appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, Ransom contended he was mentally retarded and should be ineligible for execution under a high court ruling in another case last year. About an hour before his scheduled punishment, the high court rejected the appeals.
At the conclusion of jury selection, Ransom used a smuggled 5 1/2-inch piece of broken glass hidden in his hand to try to stab one of his attorneys in the back. Ignoring orders from a bailiff to back off, Ransom turned his attention to a nearby prosecutor. “He was coming at me and his words were very clear: `I’m going to kill you! I’m going to kill you!’ ” recalled Bob Gill, now a state district judge in Tarrant County. Neither Gill nor the defense attorney, Chris Phillips, was seriously hurt in the November 1992 attack, but both were removed from the case.
Ransom went on to trial and was convicted of capital murder for gunning down Primm, 47, outside Primm’s Arlington home. Ransom was 18 at the time. Allen Wayne Janecka faces lethal injection today for being the hit man in a murder-for-hire plot that left four members of a Houston family dead.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/2009333
