Jemarr Arnold was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of Christine Sanchez
According to court documents Jemarr Arnold would enter a jewelry store and demanded jewels and cash. Jemarr would then fatally shoot Christine Sanchez
Jemarr Arnold would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
While on Texas death row Jemarr Arnold would be involved in a prison murder where he stabbed to death fellow death row inmate Maurice Andrews
Jemarr Arnold would be executed by lethal injection on January 16 2002
Jemarr Arnold Photos
Jemarr Arnold FAQ
When Was Jemarr Arnold Executed
Jemarr Arnold was executed on January 9 2002
Jemarr Arnold Case
A convicted killer with a history of violence in and out of prison was executed tonight for fatally shooting a jewelry store clerk during a robbery nearly 19 years ago in Corpus Christi.
Jermarr Arnold, 43, his confident voice booming into a speaker into the witness room, took responsibility for the killing, asked for forgiveness and thanked the members of his victim’s family for attending.
“I’m deeply sorry for the loss of your loved one. I can’t give you any answers. I can give you one thing. I give you my life, a life for a life,” he said.
The witnesses included his victim’s parents and two brothers, who stood silently and expressionless as Arnold spoke directly to them and grinned broadly as he entered the death house.
“The reason I’m smiling is I’m leaving this world. I’m going to a better place,” Arnold said.
He concluded his remarks by asking that God bless everyone there and added “Thank you all for being here.”
He then began singing “Amazing Grace” loudly. When he got to the last line of the first verse, “I was blind and now I see,” Arnold gasped on the word “see” and slipped into unconsciousness.
He was pronounced dead at 6:32 p.m., 10 minutes after the flow of the lethal drugs began.
Arnold was the second Texas inmate put to death this year. Two more are set for injection this month and at least 10 more are scheduled over the next 3 1/2 months.
Arnold acknowledged more than two dozen rapes, at least two murders, including one while on death row, and numerous robberies. His prison record had repeated instances of weapons possession and assaults.
“I’m not very good with people,” he said in a recent interview on death row. “Sometimes I feel paranoid and threatened and I strike out… I start hurting myself or other people.
“I can accept I did bad things,” he added. “I would like to think all of that is behind me.”
The U.S. Supreme Court refused Monday to review his case, and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected a clemency petition. Gov. Rick Perry denied a request Wednesday for a 30-day reprieve after reviewing the case file and court records when a former assistant district attorney who investigated the slaying said he believed Arnold was not the killer.
Arnold acknowledged shooting Christina Marie Sanchez, 21, in the head during a July, 15, 1983, holdup of the Corpus Christi jewelry store where she was working. He fled with numerous pieces of jewelry and was arrested later in California for a Los Angeles bank robbery.
Five years after Sanchez’s slaying and while serving prison time in California, Arnold wrote to the Nueces County district attorney’s office that he had information about her death. He subsequently confessed.
“I think he’s mentally ill and I think he’s not rational when it comes to choices,” Rick Rogers, an attorney who handled his appeals, said. “But when you’re talking about legal competence, it’s a very low threshold.
“I’ve never had any doubts he’s legally competent in that sense but he’s got something wrong with him, very self destructive and bizarre in what he does and because of that you really don’t know when he says something whether it’s true or not true or where he’s going with it.”
Grant Jones, the trial prosecutor, said he would not have pursued the case unless there was evidence besides the confession.
“We proved without a doubt he was in town; we proved he was at the store the day of the robbery; we connected to him, or had in his possession, some of the jewelry,” Jones said this week, adding that Arnold also provided details only the killer could have known.
“You had to ask yourself: How can a guy in California come up with all the details of a robbery in Corpus Christi? How could he know about it unless he was here?”
Arnold, from death row, said his confession was a way to get away from “the pain, abuse and violence” in the California prison system. Once back in Texas, he insisted on putting pro-death penalty people on his trial jury and from the witness stand urged them to vote for his execution.
“If you miss this opportunity, there’s a good chance that I will kill again. That’s just the way I am,” he told them.
He did.
In 1995, he used a sharpened piece of metal as a knife to fatally stab another death row inmate in the head, using his foot to force it through the prisoner’s temple, prison officials said.
Arnold was born in St. Louis and grew up in Liberal, Kan. He twice was a state mental patient in Pueblo, Colo., and served his first prison term, for rape, in Denver in 1977. He said he committed as many as 30 rapes — the first while in junior high school.
He said he mellowed in recent years, describing himself as “level, calm and peace-loving” and hoped to dispel any impression that he had no remorse for the Sanchez killing.
“I do care and I’m sorry and I wish none of this had happened,” he said.
“It’s a laugh,” Mary Sanchez, whose daughter was killed in the shooting, told the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. “This is the very, very first time he’s ever mentioned it. So we don’t believe him.”
