Edward Green was executed by the State of Texas for two murders
According to court documents Edward Green would rob Edward Perry Haden, 72, and Helen Halphen O’Sullivan, 63, as they sat in their car. When Haden laughed at Green demand for money Edward would open fire striking both victims. Edward would die at the scene and Helen Halphen O’Sullivan would pass later at the hospital
Edward Green would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Edward Green would be executed on October 5 2004 by lethal injection
Edward Green Photos
Edward Green FAQ
When Was Edward Green Executed
Edward Green was executed on October 5 2004
Edward Green Case
Condemned killer Edward Green III was executed Tuesday night despite his attorneys’ pleas to halt the execution, citing problems at the Houston police crime lab. “I do not come here with the intention to make myself out to be a person I am not,” Green said in a brief final statement. “I never claimed to be the best person. I am not the best father, the best son or the best friend in the world. “I did the best I could with what I had.” Green said he had no hate in his heart or bitterness, adding to his family and the relatives of his two victims, “I can only apologize for all the pain I caused you. May God forgive us on this day.”
As the lethal drugs began taking effect, Green wheezed and grimaced. He said something unintelligible and gasped. Ten minutes later at 8:21 p.m. CDT, he was pronounced dead. Green’s mother sobbed uncontrollably as she watched her son die. She collapsed and had to be assisted from the room. A second witness was placed in a wheelchair briefly.
“My heart does go out to Mr. Green’s family,” Annette O’Sullivan, 22, whose grandmother was among Green’s murder victims, said after watching him die. “My family and I know what it’s like to lose a loved one. The difference here is he’s had time to prepare and tell his family that he loves them and everything he wants to say to them. “We did not have that opportunity,” she said, adding that she had worried the execution could be stopped. She said the week leading up to the punishment had been an “emotional roller coaster.”
Green’s’ lawyers, two state senators from Harris County and the Houston police chief wanted executions stopped for all county cases until authorities can review some 280 recently discovered boxes of evidence that had been mislabeled and improperly stored. Attorneys said the boxes could contain something relevant to Green’s double murder case, but prosecutors said all evidence involving Green had been accounted for. Much of the controversy surrounding the police lab is on reliability of DNA testing procedures. No DNA evidence was used in Green’s case; his attorneys had questioned the reliability of ballistics evidence presented at his trial.
Gov. Rick Perry refused Monday to impose a blanket moratorium on Harris County executions. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, voting 6-0, refused a clemency request from Green. Hours before he could be taken to the death house, Green’s lawyers asked the parole board to reconsider its vote, saying a meaningful review of the case “is simply not possible” until all of the newly found evidence is catalogued. The board refused. Perry also rejected a 30-day reprieve, which he is empowered to grant. “The main evidence leading to Green’s conviction is his own confession to these brutal and senseless murders,” the governor said.
A similar request had been renewed in the courts as Green was moved to a small cell not far from the Texas death chamber and asked for a final meal that included two chicken fried steaks and a half-gallon of grape juice. “The integrity of the state’s criminal justice system is better served by the exercise of caution, which will result only in several months delay than the state’s shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach,” Green’s attorneys said.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to grant a stay. Green’s execution was the 14th this year in Texas and the first of two on consecutive days this week.
Green, 30, known on the street as “Peanut,” said he was high after smoking marijuana and embalming fluid when he and a friend confronted a car that had pulled up to a stop sign. When Green, brandishing a pistol, ordered Edward Haden, 72, out of his Lincoln, the man tried to throw the car into reverse. Haden and his passenger, Helen O’Sullivan, 63, were shot. “It really wasn’t necessary,” Green said of the 1992 robbery during a recent death row interview. “Ignorance – that’s what landed me here. I had a real distorted perception of life.”
Green, who was 18 at the time, was jailed on unrelated charges when police received a tip that led to his arrest. He was no stranger to authorities. He had been expelled from school, wound up at a juvenile camp after a rape accusation and was tied to numerous car thefts.
“It was such a senseless deal,” Don Smyth, the district attorney who prosecuted the case, said this week. “Green had every opportunity. This is not somebody who just slipped through the cracks. “He had been in and out of the system as a juvenile repeatedly and as a young adult, and had massive amounts of money spent on him in terms of teachers and therapists and psychoanalysts and social worker types.”
Green, who said he couldn’t remember any formal schooling past the seventh grade, said he matured on death row and equated his experiences there to attending college. “If you make it a learning ground, it can be,” he said. “My thinking pattern has changed.”
Edward Green and a corrections officer became romantically involved and had a daughter, now 5. The woman resigned rather than be fired, and she married Green by proxy.
Another Texas inmate, Peter Miniel, was set to die Wednesday for the fatal beating and stabbing of a Houston man 18 years ago. He asked that no appeals be filed.
http://www.dallasnews.com/s/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/100604dntexexecution.4d691.html
