Texas executes inmate despite botched Tennessee lethal injection, raising safety concerns

On the evening of October 7th, Jamaal Howard was pronounced dead at 8:03 p.m. Central Time, executed by lethal injection in Texas. He was 46 years old. The execution made him the seventh person put to death in Texas that year and the thirtieth in the nation—but it carried weight beyond those numbers. Howard's death came just days after Tennessee's lethal injection of Christa Pike went catastrophically wrong, and it proceeded despite his attorneys' urgent warnings that the same drug, pentobarbital, had just failed in another state's hands.

Howard had been convicted of murdering Vickie Swartout, a 42-year-old gas station clerk, on May 12, 2000. Surveillance footage from the Chevron station in Silsbee, a small town northeast of Houston, captured the killing in stark detail. Howard, then 20, walked in and immediately pointed a Colt .32-caliber pistol at Swartout. The gun misfired. She screamed. He cocked it and fired again, shooting her in the chest. As she lay dying, he asked if she had more money. He took $114 and some cigarettes from the register and left. Swartout was dead within minutes. Police found Howard hiding in a closet in a home near his grandparents' house. A Texas Ranger testified at trial that Howard was "grinning from ear to ear."

The jury deliberated for less than three hours before finding him guilty of capital murder. His defense attorney had argued Howard was insane and belonged in an asylum. The prosecutor countered that every action—the deliberate recocking of the gun, the flight home, the removal of his cap and shirt, the hiding—showed calculation, not madness. The jury rejected the insanity defense. Twenty-six years passed between the murder and the execution.

But in the final days before his death, Howard's legal team mounted a desperate challenge on two fronts. They asked Texas Governor Greg Abbott for a 30-day reprieve, arguing that the state's Department of Criminal Justice had refused to disclose basic information about its execution drugs—when the pentobarbital was purchased, how it was stored, what testing it had undergone. This secrecy took on urgent meaning in light of what had just happened in Tennessee. Christa Pike's execution, one week earlier, had gone wrong when her IV lines were either improperly placed or her veins had blown, causing the drug to enter soft tissue instead of her bloodstream. Four months before that, Tony Carruthers' execution failed when staff could not establish a required second IV line and could not place a central line. Abbott's office did not respond to the reprieve request or to inquiries from USA TODAY.

Howard's attorneys also filed a motion for a stay with the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals on the day of execution, calling it "troubling" that the state was proceeding with the same drug that had just failed in another state while refusing to let his lawyers examine its execution drug records. The court denied the stay without explanation. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene.

Howard's attorneys also raised a separate constitutional claim: that he was intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for execution under established law. They argued he had an IQ as low as 70 and that no court had ever properly evaluated his intellectual functioning under current clinical standards. The state dismissed these claims as meritless, saying Howard had raised them too late and had "acted with unclean hands" by manufacturing urgency. "Twenty-six years have passed since Howard murdered Vickie Swartout," the state wrote. "Justice for Howard's victims should be denied no longer."

Rev. Jeff Hood, Howard's spiritual adviser, had told supporters that Tennessee's recent botches were creating "a tremendous amount of anxiety" for Howard. "One of these executions could be botched at any time and at any place," Hood said. "What happened in Tennessee shows all of us what's possible." After the execution, Hood reported that Howard had struggled to understand prison staff commands and had difficulty speaking his final words. A week before his death, Hood said, Howard had forgotten who he was.

Howard's last statement expressed remorse. "I apologize to the Swartout family," he said. "I wish you had closure and peace. I wish that you accept my apology, and I wish for your forgiveness. I'm sorry for what happened." He thanked someone named Natalie for helping him "come out of my darkness" and thanked Hood for getting him "in a good state of mind to find peace and the Lord." Then he told the warden he was ready.

Vickie Swartout's mother, JoAnne Swartout, had died in 2024, but years earlier she had told reporters that her daughter's murder "tore us apart." She believed the death sentence was appropriate. "I feel very bad for his mother," she said of Howard's family, "but I can't overlook what he did." The execution proceeded as scheduled, the first in the nation since Pike's botched lethal injection raised fundamental questions about whether the method itself—or at least its execution in these states—could be carried out safely. Florida, meanwhile, is scheduled to execute James Robertson on October 13th, continuing an accelerating pace: sixteen of the thirty executions in the U.S. this year have taken place in Florida, with at least three more planned before year's end.