Leon Dorsey was executed by the State of Texas for a double murder committed during a robbery
According to court documents Leon Dorsey would go to a Blockbuster Video where he would shoot and kill two employees, James Armstrong and Brad Lindsey, before stealing money from the store
Leon Dorsey would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Leon Dorsey would be executed by lethal injection on August 12 2008
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When Was Leon Dorsey Executed
Leon Dorsey was executed on August 12 2008
Leon Dorsey Case
A twice-convicted killer with a history of violence that continued even after he was sent to death row was executed Tuesday for gunning down two video store workers during a 1994 robbery.
“I love all y’all. I forgive all y’all. See y’all when you get there,” Leon David Dorsey IV said in his final statement. “Do what you’re going to do.” Dorsey, 32, acknowledged his sister when witnesses filed in but didn’t direct any comments to the relatives of his victims.
He was pronounced dead at 6:27 p.m. CDT, nine minutes after the lethal drugs began to flow.
The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year upheld his conviction and death sentence and no late appeals were filed to try to block Dorsey’s lethal injection.
Prison records showed that since Dorsey arrived on death row eight years ago, he’s had at least 95 disciplinary cases, including a 2004 attack where he used an 8 1/2-inch shank to stab an officer 14 times in the back. The officer’s body armor prevented serious injuries. Less than two weeks ago, authorities recovered another shank from his cell. His threats of violence kept prison officials from making him available for media interviews as his execution date approached, but prison officials said he offered no resistance as he was led to the death chamber.
“He’s mean,” said Toby Shook, a former Dallas County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Dorsey for capital murder. He called Dorsey a “true psychopath.” “He’s very smart, very organized. … He just was always headed in this direction,” Shook said. “Every day he was looking to hurt someone. It was the only satisfaction he got in life.”
Dorsey was already serving a 60-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to killing a woman during a convenience store robbery when a Dallas police cold case squad gathered enough evidence to tie him to the unsolved shooting deaths of James Armstrong, 26, and Brad Lindsey, 20, at a Blockbuster Video store in East Dallas where they worked.
Evidence showed Dorsey, who called himself “Pistol Pete,” cased the place on Easter Sunday night in 1994, then returned after midnight to steal $392 from a cash register. Then 18, Dorsey shot the workers when Armstrong had difficulty opening a safe at gunpoint and Lindsey tried to run. Most of the crime was recorded on security cameras in the store.
“Viewing Dorsey’s execution will not bring any happiness, but we’ve lived to see justice for James 14 years later and today we pray for Dorsey’s father,” Armstrong’s parents, Gerald and Nanci Armstrong, said in a statement released after the execution. Nanci Armstrong said she struggled with forgiving Dorsey “but I knew that I had to forgive him.”
Dorsey initially was questioned about the slayings after his girlfriend reported to police that he had admitted the shootings to her. But police initially believed he was too tall, based on images from the security tape. When the case was reopened in 1998, Dallas authorities had the tape analyzed by the FBI and determined Dorsey could have been the gunman.
The Ennis robbery, in which 51-year-old convenience store manager Hyon Suk Chon was killed, occurred five months after the video store killings. “You hate to see that, knowing that potentially if the technology had been as good when the crime was committed, someone else would not have been killed,” said Jason January, who prosecuted the capital case with Shook.
Some of the evidence prosecutors used in their push for the death penalty was in an interview he gave to a reporter while he was awaiting trial. “I’ve done cut folks; I’ve done stabbed folks; I’ve killed folks,” he told The Dallas Morning News. “But it don’t bother me.”
Dorsey at age 12 moved to Waxahachie to live with his grandparents after he was booted from Germany, where his mother was stationed in the Air Force. Records show when he was 14 he took a gun to school and fired it. At 16, he fired at a couple driving in a car. “He’d walk down the street with a sawed-off shotgun tied to his arm and with a coat on and then just throw it open — just to see the reaction of people,” Shook said. “He’s a piece of work.”
Dorsey was the seventh prisoner executed this year in the nation’s most active death penalty state and the first of two inmates scheduled to die this week. Two more are to die next week.