HUNTSVILLE, Texas, March 23 (UPI) — Adam Kelly Ward, on death row in Texas for nine years after a capital murder conviction and regarded by courts as mentally ill, was executed by lethal injection.
Ward, 33, died Tuesday evening in the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas. His last words before losing consciousness were, “This is wrong, what’s happening. This is not a capital case; it never was a capital case; I had never intended to do anything. I know there’s something else I need to say, but I don’t know. I feel it.”
Throughout his 2007 trial and subsequent appeals, courts recognized Ward’s mental illness, a federal court appeal noting that by age 15, Ward “interpreted neutral things as a threat or personal attack” and saying Ward “has been afflicted with mental illness all his life.” State and federal courts nonetheless rejected his appeals, saying his illness did not “rise to the level” of making him categorically ineligible for the death penalty, an opinion issued last week by Judge Elsa Alcala of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
A subsequent appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was rejected, prompting the execution.
In 2005 Ward shot and killed Michael Walker, a Commerce, Texas, housing and zoning enforcement officer. Walker visited the home of Ward and his father to photograph continuing violations of unsheltered storage; Walker was sprayed with a hose while Ward washed his car, then left to enter the house. Ward’s father suggested to Walker it would be “best if he left the property” before Ward returned to the scene with a pistol. Ward shot Walker nine times, killing him, and was charged with intentionally murdering Walker while committing an obstruction or retribution, making it a capital murder case.
Ward became the fifth person executed in Texas in 2016.
Prior to the execution, Dick Walker, the father of Michael Walker, said he has forgiven Ward for killing his son, adding the past 10 years have been difficult.
“Your grandkids (Michael Walker’s two children, who were nine and 11 when their father was killed) are now 19 and 21 and when they break down and start crying, it tears you up… (I’ll) try to get my head straight that this bad part of my life is over with. Prayer and friendship has been so important in these times. I live in an amazing town. Commerce is an amazing town,” Dick Walker said.
