Houston — A Texas man is scheduled to be executed on Tuesday evening after being tied to five deaths and convicted of fatally murdering twin 16-year-old girls more than 30 years ago.
Garcia White was convicted in the December 1989 murders of Annette and Bernette Edwards. The bodies of the twin daughters and their mother, Bonita Edwards, were discovered in their Houston residence.
White, 61, a former college football player who eventually worked as a fry cook, was set for a lethal injection in Huntsville’s state penitentiary on Tuesday evening. White would be the sixth convict executed in the United States in the past 11 days.
White allegedly went to the girls’ Houston house to smoke crack with their mother, Bonita, who was also fatally murdered. When the girls emerged from their room to investigate what had happened, White attacked them. According to the evidence, White broke through the girls’ bedroom’s locked door. He was later implicated in the deaths of a grocery shop owner and another woman.
“Garcia White committed five murders in three separate deals, with two of the victims being teenage girls. “This is the type of case that the death penalty was intended for,” said Josh Reiss, chief of the Post-Conviction Writs Division at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office in Houston.
White’s lawyers have petitioned the United States Supreme Court to halt his execution after lower courts denied his prior requests for a reprieve. On Friday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles declined White’s request to commute his death sentence or offer him a 30-day reprieve.
His lawyers said that Texas’ top criminal appeals court had refused “to accept medical evidence and strong factual backing” demonstrating White’s intellectual disability.
In 2002, the Supreme Court banned the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. However, it has given states some leeway in determining how to identify such infirmities. Justices have debated how much discretion to allow.
White’s attorneys also accused the Texas appeals court of denying his defense team the opportunity to present evidence that could have spared him the death penalty, such as DNA evidence that another man was also at the crime scene and scientific evidence that would show White was “likely suffering from a cocaine-induced psychotic break during his actions.”
White’s lawyers also contended that he is entitled to a second review of his death sentence, claiming that following a recent Supreme Court decision in another Texas death row case, the Texas appeals court established a new mechanism for sentencing in capital cases.
“Mr. White’s case exemplifies everything wrong with Texas’ existing death penalty: he has evidence that he is cognitively challenged, yet the (Texas appeals court) refuses to allow him to develop. White’s attorneys stated in their appeal to the high court that he possesses important information that could result in a sentence other than death, but he is unable to present or develop it.
In a brief with the Supreme Court, the Texas Attorney General’s Office stated that White has not submitted evidence to substantiate his claim of intellectual disability. The motion also stated that White’s assertions of evidence of another person at the crime scene and that cocaine usage influenced his behavior had previously been dismissed by the court.
“White provides no cause to postpone his execution date any longer. The attorney general’s office stated that the victims of White’s killings, including the Edwards family, deserve punishment for his atrocities over decades.
The twin girls and their mother’s deaths were unresolved for about six years until White confessed to the killings after being detained in connection with the July 1995 death of grocery store owner Hai Van Pham, who was violently beaten during a robbery at his business. Police said White also admitted to fatally beating another lady, Greta Williams, in 1989.
White would be the fifth convict executed this year in Texas, the nation’s busiest capital punishment state, and the nineteenth in the United States.