2017: Christopher Wilkins, straight talker
January 11th, 2017 Headsman
Texas today conducted the first U.S. execution of 2017 with the lethal injection of droll drug murderer Christopher Wilkins.
Wilkins wouldn’t quite qualify for our “volunteers” tag and he fired away at his available appeals all the way to the end. But he also went out of his way not to throw up any barriers, legal or psychological, against putting him into the death penalty system. It has been well said that wretches hang that jurymen may dine, but in Wilkins’s case he mouthed friendly reassurances to teary-eyed jurors who had just condemned him to die.
“You’ve got a job to do. You tell the judge ‘get a rope’ or not,” he had said to them during his sentencing hearing, when a few well-chosen syllables might have made his life worth keeping in their eyes. “Look, it is no big deal. It is no big deal.”
There is — was — a disarming want of pretense in the man, “candid to a degree you don’t see” in the rueful words of his defense attorney. He chatted in that hearing openly about his white supremacist tattoos — just prison swag from his recent stint in the federal pen, he said — and his short temper — explicitly discouraging jurors from cutting him state-of-mind slack for his drug habit — and his dim future course in life. Would he ever change?, prosecutors asked him. “I believe it’s a little late,” the 39-year-old answered, justly.
Wilkins had shot Willie Freeman and Mike Silva dead after Freeman tricked him into buying “crack cocaine” that turned out just to be gravel. He’d continued using with Freeman for some weeks after this offense, but Freeman pissed him off by laughing to his face about the con. (Silva just happened to be with them at the time.) As he warned: a short fuse. It transpired that he had also murdered someone in a dispute over a pay phone.
“I know they are bad decisions,” the too-incisive Mr. Wilkins said, again to his jury. “I make them anyway.”
On this day..
- 1915: Mewa Singh, Sikh martyr-assassin - 2020
- 1800: Kyra Frosini, Ioannina socialite - 2019
- 1769: John Martin Andrew, John Fielding prey - 2018
- 1957: Jack Gilbert Graham, terror of the skies - 2016
- 1830: William Banks, housebreaker - 2015
- 1909: The Pollet gang, breaking the French moratorium - 2014
- 1951: Harley LaMarr, dutiful son - 2013
- 1801: Chevalier, bomb plot scapegoat - 2012
- 2010: Salah ibn Rihaidan ibn Hailan Al-Johani, Medina serial rapist - 2011
- 1897: The Thirteen Martyrs of Bagumbayan - 2010
- 2003: Nobody in Illinois - 2009
- 1944: Galeazzo Ciano and four other Italian Fascists - 2008
Entry Filed under: 21st Century,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Drugs,Execution,Lethal Injection,Murder,Ripped from the Headlines,Texas,USA
Tags: 2010s, 2017, christopher wilkins, january 11, literally executed today
