This week in 2006

After being carried into the execution chamber:
“I want everyone to know I did not walk to this because this is straight-up murder. I am not going to play a part in my own murder. No one should have to do that . . . I do not know all of your names and I don’t know how you feel about me. And whether you believe it or not, I did not kill them . . . You have to move past it. It is time to move on.”

— Lamont Reese, convicted of murder, lethal injection, Texas.
Executed June 20, 2006

Admitted drug dealer Reese, twenty-eight, protested his own execution by not walking to the death chamber. He did say, however, that he was glad it was now instead of “10 or 20 years” in jail, according to the Associated Press. A triple murder charge had resulted in Reese’s death sentence. After he delivered his final words, he gasped.

At that moment, the AP reported, “his mother, Brenda Reese, began pounding with her fists on the chamber window and began screaming repeatedly, ‘They killed my baby.’ “She kicked two holes in the death chamber wall and eventually was removed from the chamber. She sobbed loudly as she walked from the prison and nearly collapsed as she reached the prison administration building across the street.”