Orien Joiner was executed by the State of Texas for a double murder
According to court documents Orien Joiner would break into his neighbors home where he would murder Carol Lynette Huckabee and Eva Marie DeForest
Orien Joiner would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Orien Joiner would be executed by lethal injection on July 12 2000
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When Was Orien Joiner Executed
Orien Joiner was executed on July 12 2000
Orien Joiner Case
Former long-haul trucker Orien Cecil Joiner went quietly to his death Wednesday, proclaiming his innocence while insisting he was ready to die. “My work on earth is done,” Joiner said before receiving a lethal injection for the fatal slashing and stabbing of two Lubbock women who lived in an apartment next to him in December 1986. Joiner’s statement lasted less than two minutes. He spoke matter-of-factly and nodded and smiled at a friend. “As I’ve said since the very first thing, I am innocent of this crime,” he said. “And God knows I’m innocent, and the poor people that was murdered knows I am innocent. And when I get to heaven, I’ll be meeting you and we’ll all talk.”
Joiner, 50, said he felt sorry for the family of the victims, but that someday the real killer would be caught and another execution would have to take place. “If it takes my death to make them feel happy, then I will bless them. I don’t have hard feelings toward anyone because the Lord feels that it is my time to come home to him,” he said. The lethal drugs were administered at 6:11 p.m. Joiner was pronounced dead at 6:17 p.m. While being injected, he mouthed “I love you” to someone. Then he gasped, coughed and closed his eyes.
Joiner’s execution brought to 25 the number of condemned inmates put to death in Texas this year. One more execution is set for later this month and at least six are scheduled for August. Joiner had called police the week before Christmas 1986 to tell them he discovered the bloody bodies of waitresses Carole Huckabee, 26, and Eva Marie DeForest, 29, after seeing two men flee the women’s apartment and escape over a backyard fence. Authorities, however, determined it was Joiner who was responsible for the carnage.
Both victims were bound with duct tape. DeForest was stabbed 41 times, her throat was cut and the broken knife blade was left sticking out of her chest. Huckabee, her roommate, had her face and neck slashed plus four stab wounds to her chest. Both were raped during or after the fatal attacks. Prosecutors produced a witness, a neighbor, who testified he saw Joiner near the victims’ apartment with blood on his shirt and dripping from his hand. Tests of blood stains on Joiner’s shirt matched the blood types of both women. “The state doesn’t have to prove motive, but obviously the sexual aspect looms large in that regard,” former Lubbock County District Attorney Travis Ware, who prosecuted Joiner, said this week. “Presumably they were objects of his fancy.” Joiner, in a recent death row interview, said he spotted the bloody bodies when he looked through a window, put his fist through the window to get the door open, then called police. He said blood on his shoes, which prosecutors used against him at his trial, got there when he and a police officer walked through the apartment. “I’m very sorry for their families, along with my family, thinking I did something I didn’t,” he said.
Police investigating Joiner’s report that two men ran from the victims’ apartment could find no footprints in the muddy ground where Joiner said he saw the men hop a fence. The punishment drew far less attention than the execution last month of convicted killer Gary Graham. Graham’s claims of innocence and an unfair trial focused attention on Texas as the nation’s most active execution state and the support of the death penalty by Bush, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
”(Graham) had a lot of important people backing him and he was black,” Joiner, who is white and was known in prison as O.C., said. “He was in the cell next door to me. He told me: ‘If I wasn’t black, O.C., I wouldn’t be getting all this publicity.’” Asked if that troubled him, Joiner replied: “At first, it did… I don’t mind dying, if that’s what the Lord wants, but I want my innocence proven. If not for my belief in the Lord, I’d be a nut case. But I’m happy as a lark. I know where I’m going.” Joiner, who grew up in Macon, Ga., said he moved his small trucking business from North Carolina to Texas to take advantage of Texas’ lower taxes. “Greed brought me to Texas,” he said.
Four weeks before the killings, Joiner was hospitalized for emotional problems. Evidence showed three days before the murders, he held his estranged wife hostage at knifepoint and assaulted her. Prosecutors also showed the jury he had an explosive temper and an affinity for knives.