James Collier was executed by the State of Texas for a double murder
According to court documents James Collier was planning on kidnapping his daughter who was visiting her stepfather. Collier would arrive at the home and fatally shoot Timothy Reed and Gwendolyn Reed. Timothy Reed was a roommate of his daughters stepfather.
James Collier would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
James Collier would be executed by lethal injection on December 11 2002
James Collier Photos
James Collier FAQ
When Was James Collier Executed
James Collier was executed on December 11 2002
James Collier Case
A Wichita Falls man who insisted on defending himself during his 1996 capital murder trial for the shooting deaths of a woman and her son was executed Wednesday.
“I only want to say that I appreciate the hospitality that you guys have shown me and the respect,” James Paul Collier said to the chaplain and warden. He made no mention of the killings during his final statement. There were no witnesses for either Collier or his victims’ family. “The last meal was really good,” Collier said about the fried fish, chicken fried steak, baked potato and ice cream he ate, only a portion of which matched his final request. Collier had asked for a T-bone steak, 30 jumbo shrimp with cocktail sauce, a baked potato, french fries, a chocolate malt, one gallon of vanilla ice cream and three cans of Big Red.
“Thank you guys for being there and giving me a little spiritual guidance and support,” he said, his words drifting off. He then twitched, began coughing and let out one loud snore as the drugs took effect. Collier was pronounced dead at 6:15 p.m., eight minutes after the drugs began flowing through an IV placed above a tattoo on his right arm.
Collier’s court-appointed attorney, prosecutors and the judge unsuccessfully attempted to dissuade him from representing himself at his trial. “He is one of the more difficult individuals I have ever dealt with largely because he is so stubborn,” defense attorney John Curry said. “He wanted what he wanted and wouldn’t listen to anything else.”
After Collier was deemed competent to defend himself, Curry said he was left with no choice but to sit and watch along with jurors as Collier questioned witnesses, fell victim to legal snafus and made the daughter he had gone to kidnap on the day of the shootings recoil in the witness chair as he approached her, the public defender said. “It was horrible,” Curry recalled. “He couldn’t have done anything more to get himself on death row than he did, short of threatening the judge and the jury.”
Collier was the 33rd and final person to be executed in Texas in 2002. His death brought the total to 289 since Texas reinstated the death penalty in 1982. At least 14 executions are scheduled in the first three months of 2003.
Authorities believe Collier planned to kidnap his 13-year-old daughter when he went into the home of her stepfather, Phillip Hoepfner, with a shotgun on March 14, 1995. The girl, who had moved to Oklahoma with her mother, was in Wichita Falls visiting Hoepfner for spring break, Wichita County District Attorney Barry Macha said. “He could not understand why she would prefer the stepfather over him,” said Curry, who added Collier wanted to have a close relationship with his daughter but hadn’t spent much time with her.
Collier fired his first shots through the glass storm door on Hoepfner’s home and then entered, killing Timothy Don Reed, 31, who lived there with Hoepfner, and also Reed’s mother, Gwendolyn, 51. Collier didn’t know either of the victims he confessed to killing after police caught him in New Mexico. Collier, who describes himself as a mentally ill “child in a man’s body,” said he wanted to be found innocent and decided to defend himself when Curry told him the best he could hope for was a life sentence. “I didn’t know nothing about law, except I watched `Perry Mason’ with the kids,” Collier, 56, said recently from death row. “That was my whole schooling as far as courtroom tactics.”
Jurors took 12 minutes to sentence Collier to death for the fatal shootings.
The U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in June that executing the mentally retarded is unconstitutional, refused to block Collier’s execution Wednesday. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens dissented. An IQ of 70 is generally considered the threshold for retardation. Macha said Collier exceeds that threshold with an IQ somewhere in the range of 78 to 91, according to a neuropsychologist who testified at his trial. “James Paul Collier certainly is an example of where the death penalty is appropriate given the horrific facts in this case and his background,” he said. “He is a violent person and has no regard for other people and their rights.”
Collier says he had a bad reputation prior to the shootings. “Back when I was young, I got into a lot of trouble because I had all those disorders,” he said. “Most of my trouble was caused by other people, not something I did.”
During the punishment phase of Collier’s trial, jurors heard about two 1970 narcotics convictions, a 1971 robbery conviction, a 1987 assault conviction and a 1995 driving while intoxicated arrest during which authorities said they found a 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun in Collier’s car. “The DA made it look like I was some kind of notorious criminal,” Collier said, “but most of that stuff wasn’t nothing but minor stuff.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/1698087
