A Texas man put to death on Wednesday for a murder 15 years ago became the busy death penalty state’s first prisoner executed in 2016. Richard Masterson, 43, was pronounced dead at 6.53pm, 25 minutes after the lethal injection began. His last meal is unknown.
‘I’m all right with this,’ he said. ‘Sometimes you have to live and die by the choices you make. I made mine and I’m paying for it.’ He said he was being sent ‘to a better place’. He mouthed a kiss to relatives and friends who were watching the execution through a window and told them he loved them.
As the drug Pentobarbital took effect, he began snoring. After about a dozen snores, he stopped moving. Masterson had claimed the January 2001 strangulation of Darin Shane Honeycutt was accidental, and he had several appeals before the courts, including four with the US Supreme Court. His last-day efforts to stop his execution were rejected.
Texas is the nation’s busiest death penalty state, having carried out 13 lethal injections in 2015, which accounted for nearly half of the 28 executions nationwide. Masterson had testified at his trial that the death of the 35-year-old Honeycutt in Houston happened accidentally during a chokehold that was part of a sex act. The two had met at a bar and then went to Honeycutt’s apartment.
Court records showed Masterson confessed to police, told others about the killing and acknowledged Honeycutt was slain on purpose in a letter to the Texas attorney general in 2012. ‘I meant to kill him,’ Masterson wrote to then-Attorney General Greg Abbott, who is now the state’s governor. ‘It was no accident.’