Michael Richard knocked at the door of Marguerite Lucille Dixon, a 57-year-old nurse and mother of seven children, on the pretext of asking if her if a van was for sale. Dixon out of kindness, invited Richard into her home for a drink of water on that hot August day in 1986. When Richard left, he saw two of Dixon's kids leave right after him. He returned to the house, pulled a gun on the woman, raped and fatally shot her, took two television sets and left in their van. The two children returned home to find their mother's body in her darkened home. He went to Houston, about 30 miles to the southeast, and gave the .25-caliber pistol to a friend and swapped the TVs for some cocaine. A fingerprint on a sliding glass door led police to Richard, who confessed the shooting was an accident.
Richard was no stranger to violence; he had at least five felony convictions and had been released from his second prison term just eight weeks before the 1986 murder. This was not the first time Richard faced the executioner; on September 25, 2007 he was to be executed by lethal injection. He was finally executed on October 12, 2007.
The news media would have you believe that Richard was the victim of an overly stern, stubborn judge who had refused to allow extra time when Richard's lawyer's computer had crashed. The real truth is that Richard's time was finally up. It was his time to pay the final price. The possible procrastination of his lawyer in filling a stay may have been Richard's final undoing.
How many stays of execution, years of wasteful court petitions are necessary to keep a convicted criminal from meeting his death. Richard was a prisoner waiting on death row for the last twenty-one years. Justice was served and the news media should be more truthful with their readers and viewers and not lead them into false conclusions.
K.
P.S. in the process of writing this blog my computer began to "hang up."
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