Texas to execute two on Wednesday

HOUSTON - Texas is set to carry out a rare double execution on Wednesday night (Thursday NZT), when two men convicted of separate murders will receive lethal injections.

Barring intervention by the courts or Governor Rick Perry, Douglas Roberts, 42, will be put to death first, followed quickly by Milton Mathis, 26, officials said.

Originally, they said Mathis would go first but later said that was incorrect because Roberts was sent to prison before Mathis.

"Witnesses to the first execution will be escorted out and witnesses to the second will be brought in," said prison spokeswoman Michelle Lyons.

"All the medical supplies and bedding will be switched. When we proceed will depend, as always, on what is working in the courts," she said.

Texas leads the nation with 340 executions since resuming capital punishment in 1982. It was the last state to kill two people on the same night.

That took place on August 9, 2000 when Brian Roberson, 36 and Oliver Cruz, 33, died 30 minutes apart in the Texas death chamber, which is at a state prison in Huntsville, 120 km north of Houston.

Texas also did it on January 31, 1995 and June 4, 1997. Before that, it had not happened in the state since September 5, 1951.

The most known executions in Texas in one day took place on February 8, 1924 when the state used its new electric chair to put five people to death.

Lyons said Mathis and Roberts would be held in separate cells near the death chamber and would have separate chaplains to assist them in the hours leading up to execution.

Shortly after 6pm CDT (11am Thursday NZT) on Wednesday, Roberts is scheduled to be strapped into the lone gurney in the death chamber and injected with a lethal mix of chemicals.

His body will be removed; then officials will change the needles and tubes used to inject the chemicals, change the gurney sheets and bring in Mathis.

"We basically treat it as two separate events that happen to happen on the same evening," said Lyons.

Having two executions on the same day is just a coincidence because the dates are set by the judges who preside over the criminal cases of each inmate.

The judges usually do not consult with each other and their only scheduling criteria is that no executions are performed around Christmas or Easter, officials said.

Mathis was condemned for a 1998 shooting spree at a reputed drug den near Houston that left two people dead and another paralysed.

Roberts was sentenced to death for kidnapping and stabbing a San Antonio man to death in 1996.

They would be the fifth and sixth people executed in Texas this year.

- REUTERS