Texas executes man a week after Christa Pike’s failed injection

Texas has executed Jamaal Howard in the first US execution since Tennessee’s failed attempt to put Christa Pike to death on 30 September.

Howard, 46, was executed by lethal injection at Huntsville on 7 October, the Texas Tribune reported. Howard’s last statement was an apology, “sorry for what happened”, and a request for forgiveness.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s summary of the offence says that on 12 May 2000 Howard, then 20, robbed a convenience store in Silsbee and shot a 42-year-old clerk once in the chest, causing the clerk’s death. Howard took $114 from the cash register. The department lists Hardin County as the county of conviction and records that Howard arrived on death row on 26 April 2001.

Howard’s lawyers had asked Governor Greg Abbott to delay the execution by 30 days while they waited for information from the department about whether the state’s stock of the drug was safe to use. Abbott did not respond to the letter, and the governor’s office did not say before the execution whether Abbott planned to respond.

The lawyers wrote that Howard should not be executed with a drug whose history the State has refused to disclose to the defence, within days of “the same drug failing in another state”.

Texas uses pentobarbital compounded in pharmacies because drug manufacturers refuse to sell it for executions. The state tests the vials it holds and extends their use date if it decides the drug will work effectively, a process critics have called unsafe.

Howard’s petition to the US Supreme Court argued that Howard suffered from mental illness and was intellectually disabled, which made Howard ineligible for the death penalty under the Eighth Amendment. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied Howard’s latest appeal, and the courts rejected the petitions filed with the Supreme Court.

Before the trial, the court held two competency hearings at the state’s request to decide whether Howard was fit. The jury deadlocked the first time. It found Howard fit in the second hearing, after Howard’s attorney did not call the attorney’s expert witness, according to court records.

What happened before

Pike, 50, was sentenced to death in 1996 for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Pike survived two injections of pentobarbital in Tennessee on 30 September; Pike’s lawyers said on 6 October that Pike had regained consciousness and was speaking.

Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, has since halted all executions in the state for the rest of 2026 and ordered an independent review of the attempt.