A mentally handicapped murderer who fatally shot two people and paralysed a third in a Houston crack house in 1998, was executed last night by lethal injection – after eating a mammoth final meal.
Milton Mathis, 32, scoffed two burgers with bacon, fried pork chops, fried chicken, fried fish, chili cheese fries, regular fries, and fruit punch, officials said.
Lawyers for Mathis, who was the 23rd person put to death in the U.S. this year and the sixth executed in Texas, had spent yesterday morning pleading his case before the Supreme Court. He previously lobbied unsuccessfully to state and federal courts.
Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry, however, vetoed state legislation in 2001 that would have outlawed executing inmates with mental disabilities.
Perry’s decision gave Texas juries the power of deciding who to execute.
A year later, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Atkins verse Virginia, but left it to the states to determine how to decide whether a person had mental disabilities.
It’s been documented Mathis had an eighth-grade education when he was convicted, and scored in the low 60s on several IQ tests, once getting a 62.
Former Texas Governor, Mark White, came to Mathis’s aid several years ago, voicing his opinion the convicts life should be spared.
White argued his low IQ scores should alter the decision.
Psychology experts have routinely put the standard for mental disabilities around a 70 IQ and lower.
‘Mathis has suffered from obvious mental disabilities since childhood,’ White has stated. ‘He has had problems with functions that come easily to most of us, like dressing himself.’
Mathis was convicted in September 1999 after opening fire in a crack house located in Fort Bend County.
Travis Brown III, 24, and Daniel Hibbard, 31, were instantly killed. A third victim, Melanie Almaguer, then 15, was also shot in the head and is paralysed from the neck down.
According to the state attorney general’s office, Mathis also turned the gun on Almaguer’s mother, but ran out of bullets.
He looted the home before setting it on fire, fled in Brown’s car, and later told a fellow inmate that he wished he had ‘killed them all.’
