Inmate commits suicide hours before execution
A prisoner in Texas committed suicide this morning in his death-row cell, less than 18 hours before he was scheduled to be executed, a prison official said.
Michael Johnson slashed his throat with a makeshift blade fashioned from a small piece of metal attached to a wooden stick, said Michelle Lyons, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in Huntsville.
Prison guards had been checking on Johnson’s welfare every 15 minutes, as is customary, when they found him unresponsive in a pool of blood in his cell, Lyons said. He was transported to a hospital in nearby Livingston, where he was pronounced dead, Lyons said.
Johnson, 29, who was scheduled to die shortly after midnight tonight, was convicted in the 1995 killing of a Waco-area convenience store clerk. He was 18 at the time of the crime.
Suicides on death row are not unprecedented, but Johnson was the closest to his scheduled execution. His last-minute appeal was still pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Johnson would have made the trip from death row to the death chamber in Huntsville, about 45 miles away, around midday today. He was to die by lethal injection.
In a recent prison interview, Johnson said he was not the man who gunned down 27-year-old Jeff Wetterman, and blamed his companion, David Vest.
Vest blamed the shooting on Johnson, took an eight-year prison term in a plea bargain and testified against his friend. Vest is now free.
Johnson, who was 18 at the time of the slaying in September 1995, would have been the 22nd Texas inmate executed this year and the first of five scheduled to die over the next five weeks.
Another condemned inmate, Gregory Summers, is set to die next week for what authorities said was masterminding a murder-for-hire scheme in 1990 that left three people – his parents and an uncle – fatally stabbed at their Abilene home. The man convicted of carrying out the killings, Andrew Cantu, was executed in 1999.
