The Chronicle‘s Allan Turner delivers the latest Chron Eye for the Death Row Killer Guy today, and it’s a pretty solid performance considering the last statement from the death row killer guy:
When asked if he had a final statement, he answered in a confident voice, “Yes, yes, I do.”
He then unleashed a stream of profanity directed to a female death row major, concluding, “That’s all I’ve got to say.”
He again looked toward his family and winked.
Charming fellow.
Still, the Chronicle has a formula that must be followed in the Chron Eye series, and so we have the requisite “nice quality” of the killer:
“Joseph was a phenomenal young man,” his mother, Lee Greenwood, said in an earlier interview. “He was wise beyond his years. He was popular in school. The girls loved him. He was an all-around athlete. He made good grades. At one point, he even played the violin.”
But then, something in his childhood sent things off track:
Things started to go awry in his last years of high school, and Greenwood, who had moved to California, began hearing from relatives in Houston that Nichols was running with a tough crowd.
And finally, the purported flaws in the justice system that led to the execution:
He died not long after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his final appeals. His case was marked by national controversy as his lawyers argued he had been sentenced to die for a murder his robbery partner, Willie Williams, had admitted to committing.
And so concludes another edition of the Chron Eye for the Death Row Killer Guy!
