The State of Texas put convicted triple murderer John Balentine to death last Wednesday after the U.S. Supreme Court denied the 54-year-old’s request for a stay of execution.
As previously reported in The Dallas Express, Balentine and two other Texas death row inmates had sued to halt their death sentences. They alleged that the State’s lethal injection drugs were expired and could cause “serious risk of pain and suffering in the execution process,” per AP News.
Balentine died by lethal injection at a state prison in Huntsville in the presence of his spiritual advisor, his ex-girlfriend, and the mothers of his three victims.
“I hope you can find in your heart to forgive me,” Balentine said to the mothers before being executed, reported AP News.
Back in January 1998, Balentine, who was 28 years old at the time, was tried and convicted for the murders of three teenagers in Amarillo: Edward Mark Caylor, 17, Kai Brooke Geyer, 15, and Steven Watson, 15.
Balentine allegedly refused a plea deal after confessing to shooting each of the victims in the head as they slept, according to Fox 4 KDFW.
As reported by Vice News, the triple murder and subsequent trial were shot through with accusations of racism on the part of prosecutors, Balentine’s defense attorneys, and the jury foreman.
However, state and federal appeals courts did not find sufficient legal merit to Balentine’s claims to justify a retrial or to vacate his death sentence.
In an emailed statement to The Dallas Express, Kristin Houlé Cuellar, director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, decried Balentine’s execution, claiming:
“The cruelty and injustice of the death penalty was on stark display in Texas last week when the State executed John Balentine. … The State put [him] to death without any substantive judicial review of the evidence of egregious racial bias among the all-white jurors who sentenced him to death more than two decades ago.”
Still, a poll conducted by the Texas Politics Project in 2021 found broad support among Texans for keeping the death penalty, possibly reflective of crime rate increases in many parts of the State.
Crime has gotten markedly worse in Amarillo in recent years — though not as bad as in Dallas, which has seen a more than 10% spike in murders year-to-date compared to the same period in 2022, according to the Dallas Crime Analytics Overview dashboard.