Larry Davis was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of Michael Barrow
According to court documents Larry Davis and accomplices would break into a home where they would beat the occupant Michael Barrow to death. Apparently the murder was part of a gang initiation
Larry Davis would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Larry Davis would be executed by lethal injection on July 31 2008
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When Was Larry Davis Executed
Larry Davis was executed on July 31 2008
Larry Davis Case
With the parents of his slaying victim standing a few feet away, convicted killer Larry Donnell Davis recited a brief biblical verse and then quietly went to his death. “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted,” Davis, 40, said, using a verse from the famous Sermon on the Mount as his final statement from the Texas death chamber gurney Thursday evening. “It is finished,” he added. Eight minutes later, he was pronounced dead.
He never looked at or acknowledged the presence of the parents of Michael Barrow, 26, who was attacked, beaten and fatally stabbed at his own home in Amarillo 13 years ago. Barrow’s parents found their son’s body. “When you lose a family member the way we lost one, it’s the first thing on your mind in the morning and the last thing at night. It doesn’t ever escape your mind,” Robert Mares, the victim’s father, said after watching Davis die. Davis never looked at Mares or his wife. Mares said he wasn’t surprised and never expected an apology, adding that he thought the lethal injection “by all means” was too easy for Davis.
Davis’ appeals were exhausted and no late appeals were filed to try to halt the lethal injection, the fourth in Texas this year and the second in as many weeks. Two more scheduled for next week are among six executons set for August in the nation’s busiest capital punishment state.
Executions were on hold in Texas and around the country for more than seven months until the U.S. Supreme Court in April rejected an appeal from two Kentucky prisoners who argued lethal injection was unconstitutionally cruel. Texas then resumed lethal injections in June.
By the time he was charged with capital murder, Davis had multiple convictions for theft and weapons convictions and had violated terms of his paroles several times. “He had an extensive criminal history stretching over his entire adult life,” said Warren Clark, one of his trial lawyers. “It makes him look dangerous and perhaps he is. I just think in a prison setting he does quite well.” “This is a bad dude,” Pat Murphy, a Potter County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Davis, said. “How bad? If you really want to know, the confession is the thing.”
In a detailed 14-page confession to police, Davis said he tied Barrow’s hands, held him down while an accomplice stabbed him and handed his accomplice the weapons, including an ice pick, a knife and a lead pipe. “He talks about how he got the knife, told him how to do it, stuck his foot across the guy’s throat to show how to asphyxiate him,” Murphy said. “It’s pretty chilling.”
Four others were arrested for the August 1995 slaying, one of them a juvenile. They took plea deals. Davis said he refused a deal because he didn’t kill Barrow. A jury in Amarillo disagreed and decided he should die.
Davis also was accused but never tried for another murder in Dallas in 1993, where authorities said the victim was fatally beaten with the top of a toilet tank. Prosecutors cited that slaying during the punishment phase of his trial to illustrate his future dangerousness, one of the elements a jury considers when deliberating a death sentence.
Davis told police Barrow’s death was a plot by two friends, brothers Raydon and Donald Drew, who needed money so at least one of them could get a teardrop tattoo, a gang symbol that can represent involvement in a killing or loss of a loved one in a slaying. Two others serving as lookouts also were involved. In his confession, Davis said he supplied the knife and an ice pick used by Raydon Drew to kill Barrow. Police recovered items stolen from the home, mostly electronics and some jewelry, at pawn shops.
Two executions are set for next week, beginning with Jose Medellin, set to die Tuesday for his participation in the gang rape and beating deaths of two Houston girls.
Medellin’s case has attracted international attention after the International Court of Justice, informally known as the World Court, said the Mexican-born Medellin and some 50 other Mexicans on death rows around the nation should have new hearings in U.S. courts to determine whether a 1963 treaty was violated with their arrests. The Vienna Convention provides that people arrested can have access to their home country’s consular officials. President Bush has asked states to review the cases. Texas has refused.
On Thursday, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, rejected an appeal from Medellin, whose attorneys argued his execution should be stopped because of the Vienna Convention provision.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/5918789.html
