Gary Graham Executed In Texas; Maintains His Innocence To The End

Jet, July 10, 2000

Gary Graham, subject of the most contentious Texas death penalty case since Gov. George W. Bush began running for president, was executed after putting up a struggle and insisting he was innocent of a 1981 murder.

Graham, 36, received a lethal injection for the killing of Bobby Lambert, 53, in a holdup outside a Houston supermarket. The state parole board and appeals courts rejected his arguments that he was convicted on shaky evidence from a single eyewitness and that his trial lawyer did a poor job.

Bush, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said he supported the execution, the 135th during his five-and-a-half years in office, and pointed out that Graham's case had been reviewed by 33 state and federal judges.

Graham vowed to "fight like hell," on the trip to the death chamber, and he did. He resisted as he was removed from his cell, and it took five officers to strap him to a gurney where they bound him with bands around his wrists and across his head-more restraints than normally are used in Texas executions.

He made a long, defiant final statement in which he reasserted his innocence, said he was being lynched and called the death penalty a holocaust for Black Americans. He asked to be called Shaka Sankofa to reflect his African heritage.

"I die fighting for what I believed in. They know I'm innocent. They won't acknowledge it," Graham said. "The truth will come out."

Graham, who had been on death row for 19 years and had his execution postponed eight times, was pronounced dead eight minutes after the lethal drugs began flowing into his arms.

Leading up to the execution, Graham met for about an hour with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, his spiritual adviser, who said the inmate talked and prayed.

Some of the witnesses on behalf of Graham included Jackson, civil fights activist Rev. Al Sharpton and activist Bianca Jagger of Amnesty International.

His lawyers filed a last-minute appeal with the Supreme Court and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, but both turned him down. The Supreme Court voted 5-4 to deny his appeal.

The parole board could have granted a 120-day reprieve, a commutation to a lesser sentence or a conditional pardon.

Graham, at age 17, was convicted of killing Lambert in 1981; he pleaded guilty to a week-long rampage of 10 robberies around the same time but said he was innocent of the murder.

No physical evidence tied Graham to the killing and ballistics tests showed that the gun he had when he was arrested was not the murder weapon.

His conviction rested largely on the word of one eyewitness, a woman, Bernadine Skillern, whose account at trial was never challenged by other eyewitnesses who contended that Graham was not the killer.