Ignacio Cuevas was executed by the State of Texas for two prison murders
According to court documents Ignacio Cuevas was serving a 45 year sentence for murder at the Walls Unit when he had a number of guns smuggled into the prison within a crate of peaches. Cuevas and two fellow inmates, Fred Gomez Carrasco and Rudolfo Dominguez, would take sixteen people hostage. When they attempted to escape Fred Gomez Carrasco and Rudolfo Dominguez would be fatally shot as well as the two victims Julia Standley and Elizabeth Beseda who were prison employees.
Ignacio Cuevas was convicted and sentenced to death
Ignacio Cuevas would be executed by lethal injection on May 23 1991
Ignacio Cuevas Photos
Ignacio Cuevas Case
The only inmate survivor of the nation’s longest prison siege was executed by injection Thursday for his role in the slaying of a hostage during the 1974 standoff.
Ignacio Cuevas was pronounced dead at 12:18 a.m., 10 minutes after the injection. The U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday night denied an application for a stay of execution, referred from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a Supreme Court spokeswoman said
Cuevas, represented by lawyers at the Texas Resource Center, sought a stay from U.S. District Judge Norman Black after Texas’ highest appeals court refused Tuesday to intervene in the case.
Cuevas’ attorneys have claimed he was mentally incompetent, and he was denied a fair trial because he could not understand English.
‘I’m going to a beautiful place,’ Cuevas said in his final statement. ‘OK, warden, roll ’em.
Cuevas was the 39th person executed in Texas and the 146th person executed in the United States since the Supreme Court lifted its ban on capital punishment in 1976.
Cuevas, 59, was the only inmate survivor of the nation’s longest prison siege. He was convicted for the murder of prison librarian Julia Standley, 43. She was among 16 hostages held by three inmates during the 11-day uprising at the Huntsville unit of the state prison system.
Two other inmates and two hostages were killed and another hostage wounded in the standoff that began July 24, 1974.
Cuevas visited with a prison chaplain shortly after he was transported to a cell near the death chamber at 12:07 p.m., prison spokesman Charles Brown said.
‘His mood appeared calm,’ Brown said, adding Cuevas requested chicken and dumplings, steamed rice, black-eyed peas, sliced bread and iced tea for his last meal.
He planned to wear a light blue shirt, dark blue pants and brown boots to the execution, Brown said.
‘Seventeen years is too long for justice to be done,’ said W.J. Estelle, who was director of the Texas Department of Corrections at the time of the prison siege. ‘I’ve got a lot of scars about it. I think somebody needs to be reminded that there are sons of bitches still like that out there in the population.
The siege began as an escape attempt engineered by south Texas drug kingpin Fred Gomez Carrasco. Carrasco and inmate Rudolpho Dominguez were killed Aug. 3, 1974, as they tried to flee the prison using the hostages as human shields.
The inmates constructed a four-sided shield of portable chalkboards and chained some hostages to the outside of the shield. Each inmate also handcuffed a hostage to himself inside the shield.
As the convicts wheeled the device down a ramp, authorities blasted it with high-pressure water hoses in an attempt to topple the shield. But one hose ruptured, and the shield remained upright.
The result ‘was a calamitous gunfight … something you can never erase from your memory of horrors,’ said Bob Wiatt, a former FBI agent involved in the hostage negotiations.
Two of the hostages were shot point-blank by Carrasco and Dominguez, and Carrasco then shot himself to death. Texas Rangers killed Dominguez as he tried to pull his gun from under the bodies. Cuevas was taken into custody after he fainted.
Evidence showed the bullet that killed Standley was fired from Dominguez’ gun, but Cuevas was tried, convicted and sentenced to death three times for her murder. The first two convictions were overturned on appeal.
Cuevas, a Mexican national from Acapulco, was serving a 45-year sentence for murder with no chance of parole at the time of the prison siege. He has maintained his innocence, but prosecutors argued at trial he knew of the escape plans and understood the hostages might be killed.
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1991/05/23/Only-inmate-prison-siege-survivor-executed/7926674971200/