David Goff was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of Michael McGuire
According to court documents David Goff asked Michael McGuire for a ride. Soon after Goff asked Michael McGuire to stop so he could relieve himself. When Goff returned to the vehicle he had a gun in hand and would bound Michael McGuire. Goff would then fatally shoot him
David Goff would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
David Goff would be executed by lethal injection on April 25 2001
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When Was David Goff Executed
David Goff was executed on April 25 2001
David Goff Case
Condemned killer David Lee Goff was executed Wednesday evening for an abduction and fatal shooting committed in Fort Worth 11 years ago while he was on parole for robbing and trying to kill two other people. Goff, 32, insisted he was innocent of the death of Michael McGuire, 34, a counselor from a drug and alcohol abuse rehabilitation center. Goff uttered a brief prayer before the lethal drugs began taking effect. “I want to give all the praise to God and glory and thank him for all that hedone for me,” he said. “With this, let all debts be paid that I owed — real or imagined. The slate is wiped clean, all marks erased. Other than that there is no justice. That’s not justice.”
Goff had nodded and smiled as his mother and five friends walked into the death house and watched through a window a few feet away. Just before the drugs began taking effect, Goff asked the chaplain standing nearby to close his eyes if they remained open. “Take them down before they take my body,” he said. Just before a grimace and a groan, Goff said he was tasting something “like rubber.” Seven minutes later at 6:20 p.m. CDT he was pronounced dead. His eyes were closed but his mouth remained open as the chaplain covered him with a sheet. There were no witnesses for McGuire.
Goff’s execution was the seventh this year in Texas, where a record 40 lethal injections were carried out last year. At least seven other inmates have execution dates, including two next month. The U.S. Supreme Court denied two 11th hour appeals by Goff’s attorneys Wednesday afternoon.
Goff said he wasn’t even present when McGuire, who worked and lived at the Star House rehabilitation center in Fort Worth, was abducted and fatally shot Sept. 1, 1990. McGuire’s decomposing body was found by some children several days later in a wooded area about six miles away. Goff was 21 at the time and on parole after serving less than five years of a 15-year term for two counts of attempted capital murder. Those crimes, both in Arlington, occurred on consecutive days in August 1984 when he was 15. Prosecutors had him certified to be tried as an adult. Like the McGuire slaying, each of the Arlington victims was shot, one in the chest and the other in the back and then under the chin. Unlike McGuire, they survived and testified against him at the punishment phase of his trial for McGuire’s murder.
“He was a poster child with his criminal history,” recalled Richard Alpert, an assistant district attorney who prosecuted Goff. “He was just a scary individual. I remember victims of his prior cases testifying. “There was no need, no reason, why he should have tried to take the lives of the two people… But he did and they were very lucky they lived. That, to me, made him especially vicious.” McGuire was shot in the left temple. A pathologist testified he had been tightly gagged and had ligature marks around his neck. A second man, Craig Ford, was arrested and charged with capital murder in the slaying but charges were dropped and Ford testified against Goff. Alpert said while Ford was present when McGuire was killed, he did not participate in the slaying.
In a letter to The Associated Press, Goff complained from death row about what he said was the incompetence of his court-appointed lawyers, who argued unsuccessfully to jurors there was little evidence and no motive to connect their client to the crime. “If I, like many other capital sentenced prisoners, are (sic) to be held accountable for the incompetence and simple indifference of court-appointed counsel, where is the justice in that?” Goff wrote. Next on the execution schedule is Allen Bridgers, 35, set to die May 16 for the 1997 slaying of a Smith County woman.
http://www.reporternews.com/2001/texas/exec0426.html
