HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — Lawyers for Texas death row inmate Christopher Wilkins looked to the U.S. Supreme Court to keep him from becoming the first prisoner executed in the nation this year.
Wilkins, 48, was set for lethal injection Wednesday evening for a double slaying in Fort Worth in 2005 that stemmed from a $20 drug deal in which he thought he was buying a rock of crack cocaine that really was a piece of gravel. He helped jurors make a decision on punishment at his capital murder trial in 2008 by telling them how and why he killed the two victims and that he didn’t care if they gave him the death penalty.
In their appeal pending before the high court, Wilkins’ attorneys contended he had poor legal help at his trial and during earlier stages of his appeals and that the courts improperly refused to authorize money for a more thorough investigation of those claims to support other appeals and a clemency petition.
State attorneys said courts already rejected similar appeals in his case and that arguments over court-approved money for investigations were legal tactics only meant to delay the punishment.
Wilkins, already a convicted burglar, fled a Houston halfway house where he was assigned in 2005 after serving time for a federal gun possession conviction. Evidence showed he drove a stolen truck to Fort Worth, where police tied him to several aggravated assaults and burglaries.
He befriended a Fort Worth man, Willie Freeman, 40, who supplied and shared drugs with another man, Mike Silva, 33. Court records show Freeman and his supplier duped Wilkins in the phony drug transaction. As they drove in Silva’s SUV Oct. 28, 2005, Wilkins said he shot Freeman in revenge for laughing about it, then shot Silva because Silva was there. Wilkins’ fingerprints were found in Silva’s wrecked SUV and a pentagram matching one of Wilkins’ numerous tattoos had been carved into the hood.
He also testified that the day before the shootings, he shot and killed another man, Gilbert Vallejo, 47, outside a Fort Worth bar in a dispute over a pay phone, and about a week later used a stolen car to try to run down two people because he believed one of them had taken his sunglasses.
Wilkins was arrested following an 11-mile police chase that ended when he wrecked a stolen vehicle and tried to run away.
“I know they are bad decisions,” Wilkins told jurors of his actions. “I make them anyway.”
Wes Ball, one of Wilkins’ trial lawyers, described him as “candid to a degree you don’t see,” and hoped his appearance on witness stand would have made jurors like him.
“It didn’t work,” Ball said.
While awaiting trial, authorities discovered he had swallowed a handcuff key and fashioned a knife to be used in an escape attempt.
“This guy is the classic outlaw in the model of Billy the Kid, an Old West-style outlaw,” Kevin Rousseau, the Tarrant County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Wilkins, said.
Thirty convicted killers were executed in the U.S. last year, the lowest number since the early 1980s. Seven were carried out last year in Texas, the fewest since 1996. Wilkins was among nine Texas inmates already scheduled to die in the early months of 2017.
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