Condemned Killer Of 2 Set To Die In Texas
HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) - The U.S. Supreme Court considered whether to keep Texas inmate Willie Trottie from the death chamber Wednesday evening for the slayings 21 years ago in Houston of his former common-law wife and her brother.
Trottie, who turned 45 on Monday, acknowledged shooting Barbara Canada, 24, and her brother, Titus, 28, at their parents' home but contended the shootings were accidental and in self-defense and not worthy of a death sentence.
Attorneys argued to the Supreme Court that Trottie's lawyers at his 1993 trial were deficient for not addressing his self-defense theory about Titus Canada's death and for failing to produce sufficient testimony about Trottie's abusive childhood with an alcoholic mother.
Another appeal headed to the justices contended the pentobarbital Texas prison officials would use for his execution had passed its effectiveness date and could subject him unconstitutional "tortuous" pain, attorney Maurie Levin said.
State attorneys were opposing both appeals. His guilt was clear and the self-defense claim was absurd and had been rejected in earlier appeals, they said.
The pentobarbital would not expire until the end of the month, tests showed proper potency and questions about the sedative were speculative, state lawyers said. They argued the appeal seeking details of the drug was merely another attempt to force prison officials to disclose the compounding pharmacy that provides its execution drugs, something the courts repeatedly have refused to order.
Trottie's lethal injection would be the eighth this year in Texas and the first in the nation's most active death penalty state since executions went awry recently in Oklahoma and Arizona. Unlike those states where a drug combination is used for capital punishment, Texas uses a single lethal dose of pentobarbital.
"I'm ready whichever way it goes," Trottie said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. "If God says `Yes,' I'm ready."
Evidence showed Barbara Canada had called police several times about him and obtained a protective order to keep Trottie away after she said he shot out the tires of her car and threatened to kill her if she didn't return to him. He called her May 3, 1993, renewing the death threat, then showed up at her parents' house and opened fire with a semi-automatic pistol.
Titus Canada also had a gun, wounding Trottie, who then cornered his ex-wife in a bedroom and shot her 11 times. Court documents said he returned to the wounded brother and shot him twice in the back of the head.
Trottie drove himself to a hospital where police arrested him.
"It was very difficult to defend on the facts," Connie Willliams, Trottie's lead defense attorney, recalled. "There were eyewitnesses. He went there with a gun ... to do what he thought he had to do."
"There's no doubt I committed this crime," Trottie said from prison. "The dispute is the sequence of how it happened."
He said Titus Canada fired first and he was defending himself. Trottie's gun "went off" during a struggle, killing his wife, Trottie said.
Trial prosecutor Johnny Sutton said the claims were "absolutely ridiculous."
"He hunted them down," Sutton said. "They already were worried about him. He was making threats."
The execution was one of two scheduled for Wednesday in the U.S. Earl Ringo Jr. received lethal injection earlier in Missouri for a 1998 robbery and double murder.
Trottie was among at least 10 convicted killers in Texas with execution dates in the coming months. Next week, an Arlington woman, Lisa Coleman, 38, is set to die for the starvation and torture death of her female roommate's 9-year-old son in 2004.
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