Published: September 17, 2009 01:03 pm      

Man executed for drug dealer’s slaying

A Texas man convicted in the shooting death of a suspected drug dealer during a robbery 18 years ago was executed Wednesday at the Walls Unit in Huntsville, the 17th this year in the nation’s busiest death penalty state.

Stephen Moody, 52, strapped to the Texas death chamber gurney in Huntsville, addressed his victim’s mother and son as they watched through a window.

“I was unable to respond to you in the courtroom,” he said. “I can only ask that you have the peace that I do.”

Then after expressing love to his relatives and friends watching through an adjacent window, he said: “Warden, pull the trigger.”

The lethal drugs began flowing into his arms at 6:20 p.m. CDT, and he was pronounced dead eight minutes later. Moody had asked that no last-minute appeals be filed to try to block his execution.

Moody accepted responsibility for killing Joseph Hall, 28, with a blast from a sawed-off shotgun at Hall’s Houston home in October 1991. Hall was described at Moody’s trial as a drug dealer known to carry a lot of cash, a characterization Hall’s son disputed in a statement released following the execution.

“My father wasn’t a drug dealer, and drugs had nothing to do with his death,” Joseph Hall wrote. “He was robbed for money he received from an accident which left him crippled.”

Hall’s brother, mother and niece added in a handwritten postscript: “Justice was served.”

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review Moody’s case last year after a federal appeals court rejected questions raised about jury selection procedures at his 1993 trial.

“I’m satisfied,” he told The Associated Press in an interview a few weeks ago. “I’m ready, man. I ain’t quitting. I went all the way. ... That’s how I look at it.”

“We have to kind of sit on our hands,” Moody’s lawyer, Philip Hilder, said last week. “We wouldn’t be normally doing that, but it is his wishes.”

Moody and an accomplice had confronted Hall, who put up a struggle when he was ordered to surrender his money.

“He started fighting,” Moody said. “He wouldn’t listen to me. He wouldn’t lay down.”

Moody said he took about $2,000 from Hall’s pocket and fled.

Hall’s girlfriend, who saw him talking with two men, crawled through a bathroom window to run next door and call 911, heard a shot and returned to find Hall dead on the living room floor. At his trial, she identified Moody as the man with the sawed-off shotgun.

The slaying went unsolved for nearly a year until a relative of the man accused of being Moody’s accomplice gave police a tip that led to their arrests. By then, Moody was in prison starting to serve a 40-year sentence for bank robbery.

The accomplice in the shooting, Calvin Doby, received a life sentence. Moody got the death penalty.

“You do what you do,” Moody said. “You pay for what you do. ... I had plenty of chances in my life.”

Besides the bank robbery conviction, the former oil field worker from Houston served prison time for auto theft and two terms for burglary.

Harris County authorities were looking at Doby’s case again after Moody recently said another man, not Doby, was his partner at the Hall shooting. Moody signed a sworn affidavit earlier this month saying Doby was innocent. Moody was questioned by prosecutors a few days ago.

Moody was the first of four Texas prisoners set to die over the next two weeks and among at least 10 scheduled for execution in the next several months.

Christopher Coleman, 37, is scheduled for lethal injection Tuesday for a December 1995 shooting spree that left three people dead in Houston. Two days later, Kenneth Mosley, 51, is set to die for fatally shooting a police officer, Michael Moore, during a bank robbery in the Dallas suburb of Garland in 1997.

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On the Net:

Texas Department of Criminal Justice execution schedule http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/scheduledexecutions.htm