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Executed - Gregory Wright - Texas Death Row - Scheduled Execution
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Scheduled Executions
Upcoming Executions
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Start : Thursday 30 October 2008, 22:00
End : Thursday 30 October 2008, 22:00
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Gregory Wright - Texas Death Row - Scheduled execution for September 9, 2009
EXECUTED
Victims: Donna Vick
The Crime: On March 22, 1997, John Wade Adams placed an emergency 911 call to the Dallas
Police Department stating that he had witnessed a murder the night before. 45 RR 191
-92. Adams subsequently led the authorities to an abandoned white Chrysler New
Yorker registered to Donna Duncan Vick. 45 RR 193-94. This led to the discovery of
Ms. Vick, found murdered in the master bedroom of her home with a pillow covering
her face and lying in a pool of blood. 45RR206,209-12. The lack of evidence to
demonstrate a struggle elsewhere in the room indicated that the attack occurred on Ms.
Vick's bed with her assailant straddling her on the bed during the murder. 45 RR 211-
15; 18 RR 28-34. Ms. Vick sustained multiple stab wounds, bruises, and cuts to her
face, neck, chin, hands, and throat area. 45 RR 211-12.
Ms. Vick, a fifty-two-year-old widow known for ministering to and aiding the
homeless, had invited Gregory Wright, a homeless person and panhandler, to reside in
her house in exchange for doing yard work. 44 RR 127-34. Wright had been staying
there as a guest for about one week prior to the night of the killing. 44 RR 127-32. On
the day before the killing, Wright and Ms. Vick drove in her car to a house in north
Oak Cliff belonging to Llewelyn Mosley where Wright purchased and used crack
cocaine before leaving with Ms. Vick. Later that evening Wright and Ms. Vick returned
to Mosley's house, where they met up with Adams. 45RR131. The three left together
in Ms. Vick's car. Id. The evidence reflects that they all went to the VFW lodge
around midnight where they stayed until 2:00 a.m. The three men returned to Ms.
Vick's home, where Ms. Vick cooked some food for Adams and Wright. 45 RR 234.
Ms. Vick then went to bed. Id. At some point thereafter, Wright held up a paper towel
toward Adams with the words "Do you want to do it?" written on it. Id Thetwo men,
armed with Adams' pocketknifeanda butcher knife from Ms. Vick's kitchen, went back
to her bedroom where they proceeded to stab Ms. Vick repeatedly to her death. Id.
Wright and Adams then gathered up iems in the house belonging to Ms. Vick,
including her microwave, portable CD player, TV, VCR, computer equipment, and
newly purchased weedeater and placed them in her car where they transported them to
the crack house to trade for drugs.2 45 RR 234-35; 45 RR 152-53.
Adams was convicted of capital murder in a separate trial six months following
Wrigh's conviction.
Evidence linking Wright to the crime included oral statements from Adams to
Detective Trippel detailing the actual offense; testimony by the owner of the crack
house, Llewelyn Mosley, corroborating the events before and after Vick's death;
Wright's blood, as established through DNA evidence found on a towel in Vick's
house and from the steering wheel and glove compartment of Vick's car; Vick's blood,
as established through DNA evidence found on the butcher knife and a pair of jeans
retrieved from the shack where Wright was arrested; Wright's fingerprint found
imprinted on Ms. Vick's bloody pillowcase; and other physical evidence corroborating
details of the trial testimony recovered in Vick's car, at Mosley's house, and at
Wright's shack.
During the punishment phase of trial, the State presented several witnesses who
testified to prior offenses by Wright indicating a pattern of increasingly violent
behavior. 50 RR 7-116. The offenses included the alleged rape of a homeless woman
that was ultimately reduced to an assault charge. There was also testimony regarding
violent and abusive behavior toward Wright's former wife that involved physical
threats to the officer who was called to intervene. Moreover, Wright was repeatedly
arrested for sniffing spray paint.
Pity The Poor Killer Website: http://www.freegregwright.com/
News: HUNTSVILLE, Texas — Convicted killer Gregory Wright went to his death continuing to profess his innocence.
Wright, from the Texas death chamber gurney Thursday evening, repeated his insistence he wasn't responsible for killing a 52-year-old Dallas-area woman who provided help to him and another homeless man nearly a dozen years ago.
"Before you is an innocent man," he said, wrapping up a lengthy final statement in which he blamed the murder of Donna Duncan Vick on a fellow homeless man, John Adams.
Adams, 45, also is on death row awaiting execution for the slaying.
"My only act or involvement was not telling on him," Wright insisted, calling himself a Christian man.
Nine minutes later, he was pronounced dead, making Wright the 14th convicted killer executed this year in Texas and second this week. About an hour earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had turned down an appeal that also focused on his claims of innocence.
"If God is really in his heart, I can tell you who opened the gates up there for him: it was Donna Vick," the woman's son, Jerry Don Blanton, said after watching Wright die. "But if he didn't really have God in his heart, he's in a dark place right now."
Wright, who would have turned 43 Saturday, was condemned for the 1997 slaying at Vick's home in DeSoto, just south of Dallas. The widow was known for helping the needy and had given Wright food, clothing and money after he said she spotted him on a street corner holding a cardboard sign offering to work for food. The out of work truck driver had lost his commercial license because of a drinking violation and had been living on the streets of Dallas for months.
"I'm disheartened," one of Wright's lawyers, Meg Penrose, said. "We're talking about a human life here. I'm frustrated, I'm despondent, I'm terribly troubled that all the judicial review is kind of a race to the gurney."
Prosecutors said both Wright and Adams were involved in the killing.
"This should have been finished long ago because there's no question about his guilt and there should be no question about the jury's verdict either," said Greg Davis, who prosecuted Wright. "He and Adams had been living on the streets together. So what he does, he talks his way into the victim's home and then he gets Adams in there, too. Both of them actually stabbed her to death."
"The truth doesn't matter," Wright told The Associated Press recently from a visiting cage outside death row, saying he was stunned at the outcome of his 1998 trial in Dallas. "I couldn't believe what was happening. I'm very upset at a number of different people. I don't blame the legal system. I blame individuals running the legal system. ... I am innocent."
Adams implicated Wright as the killer, then earlier this year recanted his statement against Wright. Then at a court hearing last month, he reversed his recantation.
Penrose characterized Adams as "a bit erratic." She said she understood demands for an execution in the case "but I thought justice demanded we executed the right person."
New DNA tests requested by Wright's lawyers had delayed Wright's execution initially scheduled for last month. State lawyers, in their arguments to the appeals courts, said the new tests "on the whole, confirmed Wright's guilt," although Penrose contended the results were ambiguous.
At Wright's trial, jurors were told that after the killing, the two men packed up items from inside the house, drove off in Vick's car and traded the loot for crack cocaine.
A day and a half later, Adams turned himself in to police, implicated Wright, directed officers to Vick's home and helped in the recovery of her car. DNA tests of blood on the steering wheel of the car was shown to belong to Wright. His bloody fingerprint also was found on a pillowcase on her bed. Wright's lawyers disputed the accuracy of the fingerprint evidence.
From death row, Wright refused to talk about specifics of the crime, saying only that it stemmed from an argument between Vick and Adams over Adams' smoking.
Another six condemned Texas prisoners are set to die in November, beginning next week with Elkie Taylor, 47, on Nov. 6. Taylor was condemned for strangling a 65-year-old Fort Worth man in 1993 with two wire coat hangers and then leading police on a four-hour chase in a stolen 18-wheeler. Authorities said the robbery and murder of Otis Flake at Flake's Fort Worth home was the second killing linked to Taylor over an 11-day period.
At least seven more inmates have execution dates for early next year in the nation's busiest death penalty state.
source: www.chron.com
Last Meal: 2 double cheese burgers with everything, 2 baked potatoes with butter, large salad with ranch dressing, 1 pitcher of milk, any desert, and 4 dinner rolls.
Final Statement: Yes I do. There has been a lot of confusion on who done this. I know you all want closure. Donna had her Christianity in tact when she died. She never went to a drug house. John Adams lied. He went to the police and told them a story. He made deals and sold stuff to keep from going to prison. I left the house, and I left him there. My only act or involvement was not telling on him. John Adams is the one that killed Donna Vick. I took a polygraph and passed. John Adams never volunteered to take one. I have done everything in my power. Donna Vick helped me; she took me off the street. I was a truck driver; my CDL was still active. Donna gave me everything I could ask for. I helped her around the yard. I helped her around the house. She asked if there were anyone else to help. I am a Christian myself, so I told her about John Adam. We picked him up at a dope house. I did not know he was a career criminal. When we got to the house he was jonesin for drugs. He has to go to Dallas. I was in the bathroom when he attacked. I am deaf in one ear and I thought the T.V. was up too loud. I ran in to the bedroom. By the time I came in, when I tried to help her, with first aid, it was too late. The veins were cut on her throat. He stabbed her in her heart, and that's what killed her. I told John Adams, "turn yourself in or hit the high road." I owed him a favor because he pulled someone off my back. I was in a fight downtown. Two or three days later he turned on me. I have done everything to prove my innocence. Before you is an innocent man. I love my famly. I'll be waiting on ya'll. I'm finished talking.
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