Lorenzo Morris was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of Jessie Fields
According to court documents Lorenzo Morris would brutally attack seventy year old Jessie Fields that would leave him with permanent injuries and in a coma. Eventually Jessie Fields would pass away with the beating determined to be the main cause of death
Lorenzo Morris would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Lorenzo Morris would be executed by lethal injection on November 2 2004
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When Was Lorenzo Morris Executed
Lorenzo Morris was executed on November 2 2004
Lorenzo Morris Case
A man condemned for the stabbing and beating of a 70-year-old man was executed Tuesday night. When asked by the warden if he had a final statement, Lorenzo Morris replied, “No.” As the lethal drugs began to flow, Morris closed his eyes. He took one deep breath and sputtered twice before being pronounced dead six minutes later at 6:13 p.m. CST.
Two of victim Jesse Fields’ granddaughters and his daughter witnessed the execution. Morris’ family visited with him earlier in the day but did not witness the execution. Morris had asked that no last-day appeals be filed to try to block his scheduled execution.
Morris’ attorney, Rob Morrow, said his client made the request in order to spare his family any additional “despair or upset.” “He let me know that he had made peace with the situation,” Morrow said Tuesday of his final visit with Morris. “We don’t agree with what has happened, but we understand it.” Morris, 52, was the 19th Texas inmate put to death this year and the first of two this week.
The former laborer and Nacogdoches native already had arrests for assault, robbery, weapons and drug possession, and had served at least two prison terms when he was arrested for stabbing and beating Fields with a hammer. When Fields died nine months after the August 1990 attack, Morris wound up charged with capital murder, was convicted and condemned. He was already serving a life sentence for the robbery of a coin-operated laundry where the clerk was shot twice but survived.
The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 6-0, refusing to either commute Morris’ death sentence to life in prison or grant a temporary reprieve. The U.S. Supreme Court last month declined to review his case.
Last week, in another Harris County case, condemned inmate Dominique Green won a temporary reprieve in an appeal that cited problems at the Houston Police Department crime lab as reason to halt his punishment. Green’s lawyers contended boxes of improperly stored and catalogued evidence kept by the crime lab and recently discovered could contain information relevant to his case and the injection should be delayed at least until the contents of those files could be inspected. State lawyers won an appeal that overturned the reprieve and Green was executed. Morris’ case falls into the same time frame for the contested lab files, although prosecutors said they had accounted for all the evidence presented in his case. Morris didn’t want to go through the same uncertainty faced by Green, who lived a few cells down from him, Morrow said.
Court records indicated Morris, who contended he became a drug addict while serving in the military in Vietnam, blamed Fields’ death on poor health care after the beating. Fields died a day after doctors had to amputate a leg that had become infected. Previous unsuccessful appeals also said jurors in his case should have been allowed to hear he had been affected by the deaths of his two sisters in a house fire and that his mother was an alcoholic who often neglected her children.
Fields was in a coma when Morris was arrested in March 1991 for shooting the coin-operated laundry operator. In interviews with police, Morris told them about the attack on Fields, but contended the victim first had come at him with the hammer, according to prosecutors. His girlfriend at the time, however, testified she saw Morris sitting on the elderly man while holding a knife and demanding to know where he kept his money. She said she never called police because she feared for her own safety.
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