A Texas man was executed on Wednesday in the first U.S. execution of the year, with Charles Victor Thompson, 55, pronounced dead after a lethal injection at the Huntsville state penitentiary. Thompson was convicted of the 1998 murders of his ex-girlfriend, Glenda Dennise Hayslip, and her new boyfriend, Darren Keith Cain, in a Houston apartment, and was declared dead 22 minutes after the injection was administered at 6:50 p.m., as reported by KHOU.
In his final statement, Thompson asked the victims’ families to “find it in their hearts to forgive him,” acknowledging the lasting trauma caused by the crime and the execution nearly three decades later. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to block the execution about an hour beforehand, and Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare said the outcome brought a sense of closure and relief to the victims’ families.
Prosecutors said a jury rejected Thompson’s claim that medical care, not the gunshot wound, caused Hayslip’s death, and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles denied his request to commute his sentence, as per ABC13. Thompson, who escaped from the Harris County Jail in 2005 before being recaptured, was executed in Texas, marking the state’s first execution of the year. The next execution in Texas is scheduled for February 10, when Ronald Palmer Heath, convicted of murder during a 1989 robbery, is set to be executed.
