David Powell was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of Austin police officer Ralph Ablanedo
According to court documents David Powell was pulled over by Officer Ablanedo when the officer found out that there was an arrest warant for Powell and was going to arrest him Powell would open up with an automatic rifle and shot the Officer ten times causing his death
David Powell would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
David Powell would be executed by lethal injection on June 15 2010
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When Was David Powell Executed
David Powell was executed on June 15 2010
David Powell Case
A Texas high school valedictorian who became a drug dealer was executed Tuesday evening for killing an Austin police officer with an assault rifle during a traffic stop 32 years ago.
David Lee Powell, 59, became the longest-serving inmate executed in Texas and one of the longest-imprisoned in the nation to die.
Powell received a lethal injection about 30 minutes after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal. His attorneys had argued unsuccessfully that his exemplary behavior on death row over the past three decades showed jurors were wrong when they decided he would be a continuing danger and should die for killing 26-year-old Ralph Ablanedo.
Asked by a warden in the death chamber whether he had a final statement, Powell gave no response. He was pronounced dead at 6:19 p.m
About 150 retired and active police officers from Austin traveled 135 miles east to Huntsville and waited outside the downtown prison in 90-plus-degree heat as the punishment was carried out. They stood at attention as Ablanedo’s family left the prison.
In May 1978, Ablanedo pulled over a car driven by Powell’s girlfriend, Sheila Meinert, because it had no rear license plate. A background check showed Powell, riding in the passenger seat, was wanted for theft and passing bad checks. Powell shot the officer 10 times with a Chinese version of a Soviet-made AK-47.
He was sentenced to death three times, most recently in 1999. The Supreme Court overturned his original conviction from 1978, and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals threw out his death sentence from a 1991 retrial.
“I am infinitely sorry that I killed Ralph Ablanedo,” Powell said in a December 2009 letter, intended for the officer’s family and kept in the inmate’s court file.
Powell grew up on a dairy farm near Campbell in Hunt County, graduated a year early as valedictorian from his small high school and went into the honors program at the University of Texas at Austin. He was majoring in physics and math and aspiring to be a doctor when he got hooked on methamphetamines and never finished college.
Powell was on his way to a drug deal when Ablanedo pulled over the car, said authorities, who later found .45-caliber handgun and about $5,000 worth of illegal drugs in the vehicle.
Meinert received 15 years in prison for attempted capital murder, served just over four years and was paroled in 1989.