Reuters
Joseph Garcia, one of seven Texas inmates who made headlines for a wild prison break in 2000 that landed him on America’s Most Wanted list, was executed Tuesday night in Huntsville. “Dear Heavenly Father, please forgive them for they know not what they do,” Garcia reportedly said before being given a lethal injection. Garcia, 47, was pronounced dead at 6:43 p.m., 13 minutes after being administered the drug. His execution came after a flurry of last-minute appeals and requests for clemency, with his legal team challenging the prosecution's use of the law of parties to convict him of a fatal shooting he long maintained he did not carry out. Garcia had initially been serving a 50-year sentence for the murder of a man during a drunken fight, which he claimed was done in self defense. But it was his part in the Christmas Eve slaying of a Texas police officer while on the run that sent him to death row. His defense argued he had only been at the scene when the killing of Officer Aubrey Hawkins took place and had not been the one to shoot the officer. “I am on death row because of the actions and intent of others and because I am one of the Texas Seven, case closed,” he wrote the Houston Chronicle regarding the case. “Is it right that I should be murdered for something that I did not do?”