Published: November 05, 2009 09:43 pm      

Bible played role in Texas execution case

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — A man convicted of fatally beating and shooting an East Texas man during a burglary almost 12 years ago was executed Thursday, in a case that gained notoriety because jurors may have consulted a Bible to justify his death sentence.

Khristian Oliver, 32, was pronounced dead at 6:18 p.m., eight minutes after lethal drugs began flowing into his arms. He was praying a Bible verse when he died.

“I know you’re not going to get the closure you are looking for,” he told his victim’s children, who watched through a window a few feet from him. “I wish you the best.”

He said he prayed for them “every day and every night” and offered them “only the warmest wishes.”

Then after telling his parents, watching through an adjacent window, that he loved them, he began saying the 23rd Psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd.”

He got through several verses before the drugs took effect.

“The good Lord was on our side this time,” said Joe Collins Jr. after watching his father’s killer die.

Oliver’s lethal injection, the 20th this year in Texas, came after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a last-day appeal and Gov. Rick Perry refused to stop the punishment.

Oliver was condemned for the March 1998 slaying of 64-year-old Joe Collins who interrupted the break-in at his rural home outside Nacogdoches, about 140 miles southeast of Dallas.

“I felt is was more self-healing for him than for us,” Joe Collins Jr. said. “He didn’t admit to much. He wanted us to feel better ... but, you know, it’s kind of hard. For 11 years, I’ve been without a dad.

“I looked at him. I didn’t see no remorse in his eyes. To me, he had a much easier way of death than what my dad did. Too easy.”

State and federal courts, including the Supreme Court, earlier upheld Oliver’s conviction and death sentence, but Oliver’s attorney renewed his appeal to the high court and urged Perry to issue a rare one-time 30-day reprieve.

A witness to the attack on Collins, in which Oliver beat and shot him with a rifle, compared it to someone getting bashed with an ax or a golf club. Oliver’s lawyers argued that jurors who improperly brought Bibles with them into deliberations without the knowledge of the trial judge in Nacogdoches County likened the rifle to a biblical iron object. In Chapter 35 of Numbers, a murderer who uses an iron object to kill “shall surely be put to death.”

Oliver’s lawyer, David Dow, said there was nothing wrong with people bringing their religious values into the jury room.

“But they must take great care to insure that, in sentencing a murderer, they follow Texas law rather than religious law, and in this case, the jurors did not do so,” he said.

At an evidentiary hearing, jurors gave various accounts, ranging from one Bible to several being present in the jury room. One testified they had them because they went to Bible study after court proceedings. Another said any reading from the books came after they reached a decision. A third said the reading of Scripture was intended to make them feel better about their decision.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said evidence was contradictory on whether jurors consulted the Bible before or after deliberations and that several jurors testified that the Bible “was not a focus of their discussions.”

Collins was hit so severely and so many times — and also was shot five times — he was nearly unrecognizable when a neighbor found him dead in the front yard of home.

Collins had left home to pick up dinner on March 17, 1998, and returned to find Oliver, then 20, and 16-year-old Benny Rubalcaba inside his home. Rubalcaba’s 15-year-old brother, Lonny, and Oliver’s girlfriend were outside waiting in a pickup truck.

As the two intruders tried to run away, testimony showed Collins grabbed a rifle and shot Benny Rubalcaba in the leg. Oliver fired his pistol at Collins, then retrieved the man’s rifle and beat him with it.

One of the teenagers testified he saw Oliver swinging the rifle at Collins. Evidence showed at least two of five shots to hit Collins came while he was on his back on the ground outside his house.

Rubalcaba, taken by friends to a hospital, told police about the attack. Oliver was arrested in Houston with his girlfriend, Sonya Reed. She turned down a 10-year plea deal, went to trial and received 99 years in prison. Benny Rubalcaba got five years and his brother 10 years. Both are now out of prison.

Evidence showed Oliver over the year-and-a-half period that culminated with Collins’ murder was responsible for numerous burglaries and thefts, many in the Waco area where his parents live.