Ker’Sean Olajuwa Ramey, a 41-year-old man who was found guilty of shooting three people – Samuel Roberts, 24, Tiffani Peacock, 18, and Celso Lopez, 38, and killing them during a 2005 attempted robbery in the home they shared in Texas, has been executed.
He was put to death in the evening of Wednesday September 24 by lethal injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville.
A jury convicted Ramey of capital murder and sentenced him to death over the shootings.
Ramey and his accomplice, LeJames Norman believed there was cocaine in the house and hoped to steal it, according to court records. They found none and killed the three victims.
Norman was put to death on 16 September, also in Huntsville. He had no last words, and no relatives or friends of the victims witnessed that execution.
The US supreme court rejected a final appeal from Ramey hours before Wednesday’s execution.
Ramey’s attorneys had argued that jurors never heard about how he suffered physical abuse as a child and grew up in poverty. State prosecutors told the court the appeal was meritless and argued that evidence showed Ramey had an escalating pattern of criminal behavior.
Norman testified at Ramey’s trial nearly two years before being sentenced to death by a jury after pleading guilty to capital murder. He testified that he and Ramey shot the victims. Ramey’s attorneys blamed the shootings on Norman.
Ramey’s former girlfriend testified that she was with him when he threw two pistols into a lake after the killings, and that he told her in detail about his involvement.
Lopez was shot four times, including in the back of the head; Peacock was shot twice in the head; and Roberts was shot five times in the chest, neck and head.
Ramey was pronounced deceased at 6:34 p.m., according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. In his final statement, Ramey expressed his devotion to God and his family and also thanked the other men on Texas’ death row for their support.
Ramey at 21
Ramey, who was 21 when he was convicted in 2007, said he grew up while in prison with the help of his fellow inmates.
“I didn’t come from a culture in a healthy sense. To you brothers, I can’t name everybody, you know who you are, I greatly appreciate you,” Ramey said.
Ramey had two unsuccessful appeals at the US Supreme Court, and a new appeal was filed September 10 with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals but was rejected. The Supreme Court denied a stay of execution for Ramey on Wednesday afternoon.
Ramey’s appeals primarily focused on allegations that the almost all-white jury that sentenced him to death was infected with racial bias, and that he received ineffective counsel from his lawyer, who was a full-time dentist and was not experienced in capital punishment trials.
Ramey is the sixth man put to death in Texas this year. Three more men are scheduled to be executed before the end of the year.
If the remaining executions are carried out, it will be the most executions in Texas in a single year this decade, after a decline in executions and new death sentences.
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