A Texas man is scheduled to be executed in 1989 for stabbing teenage twins

HOUSTON (AP) — A Texas man linked to five murders and convicted of fatal knife attacks on 16-year-old twin girls more than three decades ago faces execution Tuesday night.

Garcia White was convicted of the December 1989 murders of Annette and Bernette Edwards. The bodies of the twin girls and their mother, Bonita Edwards, were found in their Houston apartment.

White, 61, a former college football player who later worked as a fry cook, was scheduled to receive a lethal injection Tuesday night at the state prison in Huntsville. White would be the sixth inmate executed in the United States in the last 11 days.

According to testimony, White went to the girls’ home in Houston to smoke crack with their mother, Bonita, who was also fatally stabbed. When the girls came out of their room to see what had happened, White attacked them. There was evidence that White had broken open the locked door to the girls’ bedroom. He was later linked to the deaths of a grocery store owner and another woman.

“Garcia White committed five murders in three separate transactions and two of his victims were teenage girls. “This is the type of case that the death penalty was intended for,” said Josh Reiss, chief of the post-conviction writs division at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office in Houston.

White’s lawyers have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop his execution after lower courts previously rejected his requests for a stay. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Friday rejected White’s request to commute his death sentence to a lesser sentence or to grant him a 30-day reprieve.

His lawyers argued that the Texas Supreme Court of Criminal Appeals had refused to accept “medical evidence and strong factual evidence” showing that White was mentally disabled.

The Supreme Court banned the execution of mentally disabled people in 2002. However, it has given states some discretion in deciding how to determine such disabilities. Justices have wrestled with the question of how much discretion they should allow.

White’s lawyers also accused the Texas appeals court of not allowing his defense team to present evidence that could spare him a death sentence, including DNA evidence that another man was also at the crime scene and scientific evidence that would show that White “probably suffered from an illness.” Cocaine caused a psychotic break during his actions.”

White’s lawyers also argued that he is entitled to a reconsideration of his death sentence. They claimed the Texas Court of Appeals had created a new system for sentencing in death penalty cases following a recent Supreme Court ruling in another death row case in Texas.

“Mr. White’s case illustrates everything that is wrong with the current death penalty in Texas – he has evidence that he has a mental disability that the (Texas Court of Appeals) has refused to allow him to develop. He has significant evidence that leads to one “It cannot present or develop a sentence other than the death penalty,” White’s lawyers said in their petition to the Supreme Court.

In a filing with the Supreme Court, the Texas Attorney General’s Office said White failed to provide evidence to support his claim that he was mentally disabled. The filing also states that White’s claims that there was evidence of another person at the crime scene and that cocaine use influenced his actions had previously been rejected by the courts.

“White presents no reason to further delay his execution date. “The Edwards family — and the victims of White’s other murders … deserve justice for his decades-old crimes,” the attorney general’s office said.

The deaths of the twin girls and their mother remained unsolved for about six years until White confessed to the murders after he was arrested in connection with the July 1995 death of grocery store owner Hai Van Pham, who was fatally beaten during a robbery at his store. Police said White also confessed to fatally beating another woman, Greta Williams, in 1989.

White would be the fifth inmate to be executed this year in Texas, the state with the highest death penalty in the country, and the 19th in the United States

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