Sept. 23 (UPI) — Texas on Wednesday evening executed the second of two men convicted of committing the same triple murder, marking the state’s sixth execution and the nation’s 28th of the year.
Ker’sean Olajuwa Ramey, 41, was executed by lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, located about 70 miles north of Houston. He was pronounced dead at 6:34 p.m. CDT, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice told UPI in an email.
In his last statement, Ramey said that he grew “to become something greater” than the man written about in the newspapers and apologized to his two children for his failures, for not being there “and the things you may have had to go through.”
“I attempted to structure things so you can have a positive male and individuals around you guys moving forward so the knowledge that I started to give to you is not lost,” he said.
Ramey, who was 21 when he entered death row, expressed gratitude to the other inmates he came in prison, who “poured into me and showed what it means to be a man, and didn’t understand what manhood was.”
“I didn’t come from a culture in a healthy sense,” he said. “To my brothers, I can’t name everybody, you know who you are, I greatly appreciate you.”
Ramey was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in January 2007 for the murders of Celso Lopez, 38, Tiffani Peacock, 18, and Sam Roberts, 24, on Aug. 24, 2005.
Court records state that Ramey, then 20, and his codefendant, LeJames Norman, who was 19 at the time, broke into Roberts’ home in Edna, Texas, believing he had at least a kilogram of cocaine that they intended to steal. There, they shot and killed Roberts, Lopez and Peacock, then fled the scene.
Investigators received a tip that November implicating Ramey in the murders and he was questioned in December at a Texas detention facility, where he was being held on unrelated charges. Norman was arrested in January 2006 as he was attempting to re-enter the United States from Mexico, where he lived with his girlfriend.
Norman testified against Ramey who was tried first and convicted by a jury that had no Black jurors.
Ramey was executed after the Supreme Court denied his final stay application and certiorari petition earlier Wednesday. He had over the years appealed his conviction on the grounds of racial discrimination in jury selection and ineffective assistance of counsel, though those claims were rejected.
“Ramey’s trial was marred by serious constitutional violations, including the systematic exclusion of all potential Black jurors, the State’s presentation of false testimony and, above all, the abysmal performance of his trial attorney — a full-time dentist and part-time lawyer — who failed to conduct his own investigation or provide witnesses to rebut the state’s case,” the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty said in a statement following Ramey’s execution.
Norman was executed by Texas on Sept. 16.
Texas has so far scheduled three more executions for the year.
Source: U.S. News
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