Donell Jackson was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of Mario Stubblefield
According to court documents Mario Stubblefield was set to testify against David Smith so Smith paid Donell Jackson $200 to murder him. The two men would lure Mario Stubblefield outside where Donell Jackson would shoot him in the head killing the seventeen year old
Donell Jackson was arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Donell Jackson would be executed by lethal injection on November 1 2006
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When Was Donell Jackson Executed
Donell Jackson was executed on November 1 2006
Donell Jackson Case
Donell O’Keith Jackson and David Smith were fast friends. That’s why, Jackson said from death row here last week, he agreed to an early-morning ride with Smith in summer 1993. “It is why he had a gun when he knocked on the door of Mario Stubblefield’s southeast Houston house, where the 17-year-old lived with his disabled father, Prince. And why, Jackson, then 21, stood on the lawn with this teenager he did not know, fired a shot and ran to his best friend’s parked car nearby.
Police arrived to find a neighborhood friend of Stubblefield’s, who heard gunfire, clutching the dead teenager’s hand.
Last week, facing a Wednesday execution for the crime, Jackson bowed his head with regret. He killed, he said, to help his best friend, who at the time faced charges in an unrelated shooting case in which Stubblefield was the star witness.
But in a tape-recorded confession after his arrest, Jackson told officers Smith, also known as Darryl Scott, paid him — $75 up front and $125 later — to kill the witness. He now says police invented the payment story for him. That $200 meant the difference between life and death for the 34-year-old. In Texas, murder warrants the death penalty only in specific situations, including murder during a robbery or a rape, murder of a child or, in this case, murder for money.
Jackson’s confessed fee is one of the smallest amounts ever offered in a murder-for-hire case resulting in the death penalty in Texas. Just last week, Gregory Summers was executed for paying someone $10,000 to kill his parents. Of the 377 men and women executed in Texas since 1982, Summers was just the 14th to die in such a case, prison records show.
“You might expect someone to try to kill witnesses in a mob situation or a Mafia situation in New York City, but you don’t expect that to happen in Houston,” Chuck Rosenthal, who prosecuted Jackson’s case, said in closing arguments. “This is exactly what happened here.”
Jackson has an appeal pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. His lawyer, Janie Maselli, argues that the jury wasn’t able to fully consider his supportive family, church work and other evidence that might have spared him. The appeal also alleges that prosecutors violated state and federal constitutional law by striking five blacks from the jury pool. Two blacks sat on the jury for Jackson, who is black. The state disputes the claims made in the appeal: Jurors heard about and could consider mitigating evidence when deciding Jackson’s sentence, the Texas Attorney General’s Office argued in a brief filed this month. The state also argued that prosecutors were race-blind when eliminating jurors.
On Thursday, Maselli asked the high court to delay the execution to allow more time to consider the appeal. She said she does not plan to raise the murder-for-hire issue. The argument was hashed out in trial, she said, and there is no new evidence to corroborate Jackson’s story.
Although accepting his upcoming execution, Jackson won’t let the matter rest. “(Mario’s) death wasn’t about money: that’s one thing I would like his family to know,” he said in a soft voice that contrasted with his bulky frame. “I just chose my friend over him.”
Denied payment
Jackson and Smith met in high school. The two grew close enough to call each other cousins. Jackson was often at Smith’s house and treated his friend’s mother like his own. (She was one of the few people he called after his murder arrest.) So when Smith got in trouble and came asking for help dealing with Stubblefield, Jackson said, he didn’t resist for long. “I knew it was wrong to take Mario’s life, but in my warped little world I was looking at it like it’s either my friend or some guy I don’t know,” he said.
Smith also faced the death penalty in connection with Stubblefield’s death, but he received a life sentence instead. In prison in Beeville, he did not respond to a letter requesting an interview.
In his trial, he denied paying Jackson before the murder. He said he wanted only to threaten Stubblefield and that Jackson decided on his own to pull the trigger. It was in the police station, after his arrest, that Jackson first heard his best friend fingering him for the crime. Officers played part of Smith’s taped confession for him. Afterward, according to Houston police officer Alan Brown’s later testimony, Jackson blurted out: “No, he paid me.” Brown did not return calls for comment for this article.
Jackson has a different story. He was angry at Smith, yes. But he said the officers told him if he said Smith paid him that would “put the ball back in his court.” In a 17-minute taped confession he said: “I just told him, you know, whatever you can, you know, can give me and he said $200 so we left it at that.” That was enough to convince a jury in 1996. When prosecutors brought up past offenses including sexual abuse of a younger sister and the shooting of a friend — Jackson called it an accident — the jury agreed on death.
Death’s effects
Before he was killed, Stubblefield had fallen into the wrong crowd, said his uncle Curtis Smith, a veteran Houston Police Department patrolman. But, he added, his nephew wanted to right his wrongs.
In 1993, Stubblefield came to Smith with a confession: he’d been in a car during a drive-by shooting in which David Smith, no relation to Curtis Smith, shot but didn’t kill another man. The teenager’s uncle told him he needed to go to the police, and he did. He told his story to a grand jury that indicted David Smith and would have testified in trial if he hadn’t been killed. Prosecutors later called him a hero.
Curtis Smith, one of the few Stubblefield relatives still alive, said he wished he had known to protect his nephew. He dismissed Jackson’s payment denial as legal maneuvering. “What happened — he didn’t deserve that,” he said. The murder was the eventual death of Prince Stubblefield, Smith said. The elderly man lived only 10 months after his son was killed. He had been inside watching TV when the murder occurred. “He said to me, ‘I was right there and I couldn’t do anything,’ ” Smith recalled.
Jackson’s aunt, Tammy Jackson, said much the same thing about the convicted killer’s grandmother. Lula Angelo, the pastor of a Houston-area church, helped raise Jackson, one of nine siblings. She fainted after his sentencing, got sick and died four years later, Tammy Jackson said. Jackson was held back in school a number of times and did not finish the 11th grade. Maselli said she may raise the issue of mental retardation, which has gotten some off death row, as a last-minute appeal.
Jackson’s aunt said she thinks he would have been a preacher, like other family members, if he had avoided jail. From death row, where pen pal letters and a collection of pictures from around the world are his main solace, Jackson had other thoughts. “If I hadn’t gotten locked up, I think I would have been dead by now,” he said. “This place kind of saved me, but that protection is kind of running out.”
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/4294854.html
