US man convicted of pastor’s murder executed in Texas after years on death row

Steven Nelson, 37, spent 12 years on death row in Texas before being executed on Thursday. Photo / AFP

A man was executed by lethal injection in the US state of Texas on Thursday for the 2011 murder of a pastor that he insisted he did not commit.

Steven Nelson, 37, spent more than a dozen years on death row for the murder of Clint Dobson, 28, during a robbery of the NorthPointe Baptist Church in Arlington, near Dallas.

Dobson was beaten and suffocated with a plastic bag. Judy Elliott, the church secretary, was also badly beaten but survived.

Nelson’s appeals against his conviction and death sentence were repeatedly rejected by Texas courts and the US Supreme Court had declined to hear his case.

He was executed and pronounced dead at 6.50pm Wednesday local time, state official Amanda Hernandez said in a statement.

Nelson was interviewed by AFP recently at the maximum-security prison in Livingston, a town 120km north of Houston, where he was awaiting his execution.

“It’s hard at times,” he said. “You’re waiting to be put to death. So that kind of breaks a little part of you every day... You just don’t want to do nothing.”

Nelson acknowledged he served as a lookout during the robbery and that he entered the church after the murder to steal some items.

But he said it was his two accomplices, who were never brought to trial, who committed the murder.

“I didn’t know what was going on on the inside,” he said, claiming his friends “blamed everything on me”.

“So they’re free and I’m locked up,” he said. “I’m here on death row because of what somebody else did.”

“I’m an innocent man,” Nelson said. “I’m being executed for a crime, a murder, that I did not commit.”

Nelson married a French woman, Helene Noa Dubois, while in prison, but said ahead of the execution that he did not want her to witness it.

“I really don’t want her to see that – me getting pumped full of drugs and being overdosed with drugs to kill me, to make my heart stop.

“But if she makes that choice to be there then that’s her choice.”

In his final statement, Nelson said he was “at peace”.

“Always live for me and enjoy life,” he said, according to state authorities. “Know I am not scared... I’m at peace, I’m ready to be at home.

“Let’s ride, warden.”

There were 25 executions in the United States last year and Nelson’s brought this year’s number to two so far, after an earlier case in South Carolina.

The death penalty has been abolished in 23 of the 50 US states, while three others – California, Oregon and Pennsylvania – have moratoriums in place.

Three states – Arizona, Ohio and Tennessee – that had paused executions have recently announced plans to resume them.

President Donald Trump is a proponent of capital punishment and on his first day in the White House he called for an expansion of its use “for the vilest crimes”.

– Agence France-Presse