A man convicted of shooting his former mother-in-law and her mother to death was executed by injection Monday.
Wayne Mason, 48, was the 20th convicted killer executed this year in Texas and the first of three men set to die this week in the nation’s most active death-penalty state.
Mason was arrested the day after the Oct. 2, 1991, shootings of Marsha Brock, 55, and her mother, Sybil Dennis, 80. Mason was the estranged husband of Brock’s daughter, Melinda Mason.
Two weeks before the shootings, he took Melinda Mason hostage and held her at gunpoint for 5 hours, according to trial testimony.
The former drywall installer denied any role in the slayings. In his final statement, Mason said his “sellout lawyer” conspired with prosecutors to orchestrate his conviction and the failure of his appeals.
“Who’s getting the last laugh?” Mason said. “The guy who got away.”
Mason was the 219th person executed in Texas since the state resumed capital punishment in 1982, six years after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a national death penalty ban.
He was the 132nd person put to death since Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, took office in January 1995.
Condemned killer John Burks was set to die Wednesday in Texas for a 1989 robbery and murder, followed Thursday by Paul Nuncio, who raped and killed a woman in 1993.
A group of scholars opposed to the death penalty urged a halt Monday to next week’s scheduled execution of another Texas inmate, Gary Graham.
Officials with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law said they believe Graham should not have been found guilty of a 1981 killing. They said one witness identified Graham while six others either said he wasn’t the shooter or described differently the individual responsible.
