LIVINGSTON, Texas – A man was executed by lethal injection in the US state of Texas on Wednesday for the 2011 murder of a pastor that he insisted he did not commit.
Steven Nelson, 37, spent more than a dozen years on death row for the murder of Clint Dobson, 28, during a robbery of the NorthPointe Baptist Church in Arlington, near Dallas.
Dobson was beaten and suffocated with a plastic bag. Judy Elliott, the church secretary, was also badly beaten but survived.
Nelson’s appeals against his conviction and death sentence were repeatedly rejected by Texas courts and the US Supreme Court had declined to hear his case.
He was executed and pronounced dead at 6:50 pm local time (0050 GMT on Thursday), state official Amanda Hernandez said in a statement.
Nelson was interviewed by AFP recently at the maximum-security prison in Livingston, a town 75 miles (120 kilometers) north of Houston, where he was awaiting his execution.
“It’s hard at times,” he said. “You’re waiting to be put to death. So that kind of breaks a little part of you every day… You just don’t want to do nothing.”
Nelson acknowledged that he served as a lookout during the robbery and that he entered the church after the murder to steal some items.
But he said it was his two accomplices, who were never brought to trial, who committed the murder.
“I didn’t know what was going on on the inside,” he said, claiming his friends “blamed everything on me.”
“So they’re free and I’m locked up,” he said. “I’m here on death row because of what somebody else did.”
“I’m an innocent man,” Nelson said. “I’m being executed for a crime, a murder, that I did not commit.”
Nelson married a French woman, Helene Noa Dubois, while in prison, but said ahead of the execution that he did not want her to witness it.
