By Jeff Franks
Houston - Texas, which leads the United States in capital punishment, is set to carry out a rare multiple execution next month by putting to death two convicted murderers on the same night, said officials on Wednesday.
Barring intervention by the courts or Texas Governor George W Bush, Brian Roberson, 36, and Oliver Cruz, 33, will die by lethal injection in separate executions on August 9 at the state prison in Huntsville.
The unusual event could bring a new death penalty controversy for Bush, the presumptive Republican American presidential nominee, who has come under scrutiny for his home state's high number of executions.
Texas has put to death 224 people since reinstating capital punishment in 1982, six years after the US Supreme Court lifted a national death penalty ban, but has only twice performed multiple executions.
On January 31 1995, two weeks after Bush took office, and on June 4 1997, the state put two men to death. Before that, Texas had not had a multiple execution since 1951.
Two executions were scheduled on July 12, but one of them was postponed by a judge's order for DNA testing.
According to the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Centre, which collects statistics on capital punishment in the United States, the only other multiple executions in recent years have occurred in Illinois and Arkansas. The latter state put three people to death on August 3 1994.
Roberson was sentenced to die for the 1986 murder of two people during a Dallas burglary and Cruz for the rape and murder of a woman in San Antonio in 1988.
Heather Browne, spokesperson for the Texas attorney-general's office, said both still have legal appeals pending in the federal courts. Roberson was also expected to file a clemency petition with the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, she said.
Bush has the authority to grant a 30-day reprieve for condemned inmates, but has exercised that power only once. On June 1, he gave convicted murderer Ricky McGinn a stay so that DNA tests could be performed.
If both executions go forward, they would be performed one after another about an hour apart, said Texas department of criminal justice spokesperson Larry Todd.
After the first execution, the body would be removed from the lone gurney in the Texas death chamber and the other inmate brought in and strapped down.
Officials administering the lethal injections would change tubing and needles for the execution apparatus and witnesses would be shuffled in and out, he said.
"While it is unusual, it is certainly manageable," said Todd.
He said having two executions scheduled for the same day was simply a coincidence because execution dates are set by judges in the counties where the crimes occurred.
The judges usually do not consult with each other and their only scheduling criteria is that no executions be performed around Easter or Christmas, said Todd.
Anti-death penalty activists say the pending double execution once again will call attention to what they view as a "grisly" Texas death penalty record and Bush's role in it.
Since he took office, 137 people have been put to death and only two executions have been halted - one by the reprieve for McGinn and another by the commutation of a death sentence to life in prison because of doubts about evidence in the case.
In June, Bush came under political fire for the execution of Gary Graham, who was put to death amid doubts about the validity of his 1981 murder conviction. Bush did not intervene in the case, saying he believed Graham was guilty.
"It's mind-boggling and it smacks of arrogance on the part of the state and Bush to continue with these executions," said Dave Atwood, head of the Texas Coalition Against the Death Penalty.
"When you have two executions in one day, it just brings forth this whole thing where people ... look at Texas as a state that's almost living in the Dark Ages," he said. - Reuters
