Ronald Howard was executed by the State of Texas for the murder of a police officer
According to courts documents Ronald Howard was driving a stolen car when he was pulled over by Texas Department of Public Safety Trooper Bill Davidson. When the Officer approached the car he was shot in the neck causing his death
Ronald Howard would be arrested,convicted and sentenced to death
Ronald Howard would be executed by lethal injection on October 6 2005
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When Was Ronald Howard Executed
Ronald Howard was executed on October 6 2005
Ronald Howard Case
Ronald Ray Howard was executed Thursday for fatally shooting a state trooper, a slaying his trial attorneys argued was prompted by Howard’s listening to anti-police rap music.
Asked if he had a final statement, Howard looked at the trooper’s widow, daughter and brother and said he hoped that “this helps a little. I don’t know how, but I hope it helps.” Then he turned to friends and a brother who were among his witnesses, expressing love and thanking them for finding two of his children, who visited him on death row within the past week. “Love you all. Thank you so much,” he said. As the drugs were administered, he lifted his head from the gurney and mouthed that he loved them, urged them to be strong and said “I’m going home.” The slain trooper’s widow and daughter, who were standing next to the window, hugged and kissed as Howard slipped into unconsciousness. Twelve minutes later, he was pronounced dead.
Howard, 32, convicted in Austin, was executed for gunning down Texas Department of Public Safety trooper Bill Davidson, 43, during a traffic stop 13 years ago outside Edna, about 100 miles southwest of Houston. The execution was the 14th this year in Texas, the nation’s most active capital punishment state. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles this week unanimously refused Howard’s request that his sentence be commuted to life.
In an interview Wednesday on death row, Howard recalled the trooper pulling him over on U.S. 59 for a broken headlight. “How you doing?” Davidson asked Howard, who was armed with a 9 mm pistol. “But I was already in motion,” Howard said. “I’d already shot as I hear him saying that.”
Davidson, father of two and on the force for 19 years, died three days later of a gunshot wound to the neck. Howard was captured within hours of the slaying after a police chase that ended in nearby Victoria when he crashed the stolen sport-utility vehicle he was driving into a house and tried to run. Howard said the trooper earlier had pulled alongside of him, sped off, then was waiting over a hill on the side of the road as Howard drove past. Davidson then flicked on his lights and pulled him over, Howard said. “I felt like I was being taunted,” Howard said, adding that his previous encounters with police, particularly in his hometown of Houston, had soured him on police officers.
Defense attorneys argued at his trial that Howard’s constant exposure to gangsta rap music and its anti-police messages influenced him to pull the trigger. “He grew up in the ghetto and disliked police, and these were his heroes, these rappers . . . telling him if you’re pulled over, just blast away,” his trial attorney, Allen Tanner, recalled last week. “It affected him. That was a totally valid serious defense.”
“I’m not a psychologist,” Howard said Wednesday. “So I don’t know. I never said: Yes, it did, or no, it didn’t. I don’t know. But my lawyers thought it could have caused it.” At the time of the April 1992 shooting, the 18-year-old father of four was on probation for burglary. He acknowledged Wednesday stealing “a lot of cars” but said it was normal activity for kids in his part of Houston.
Jurors in Austin, where Howard’s trial was moved because of publicity in Jackson County, needed just 40 minutes to convict the admitted drug dealer and seventh-grade dropout. They deliberated six days before deciding he should die. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Howard’s death sentence in 1996 because a potential juror improperly was eliminated from the jury pool. At a second trial, in Corpus Christi in 1999, Howard again was sentenced to die.
Howard was one of three Texas inmates with execution dates this month. At least six are scheduled for November, and another in December. In last-day appeals, David Dow, with the Texas Innocence Project, argued in the federal courts Howard was abandoned by a previous court-appointed attorney who failed to file proper appeals.
Dow was appointed to the case within the past few days and argued without a reprieve, there wasn’t enough time for his team to write a petition seeking review of the case. Howard was one of three Texas inmates with execution dates this month. At least six are scheduled for November and another in December.