HUNTSVILLE, Texas — A man who beat an elderly couple to death with a metal pipe to get money for drugs was executed by injection Thursday in a Texas prison.
Jeffrey Doughtie, 39, was the 12th person put to death this year in Texas, which leads the nation in capital punishment.
In a last statement, made while he was strapped to a gurney in the state's death chamber, Doughtie said his execution came so long after his crime — eight years — that it had little effect on him.
"If you had wanted to punish me, you would have killed me the day after instead of killing me now. You are not hurting me now. I had time to get ready, to tell my family goodbye, to get my life where it needed to be," he said.
"It started with a needle, and it is ending with a needle," he said of his plight.
Doughtie was condemned to die for killing Jerry Lee Dean, 80, and wife, Sylvia, 76, at their antique store in Corpus Christi, Texas, on Aug. 2, 1993.
They had known Doughtie for years but refused to give him a $30 loan he wanted for drugs, so he beat them to death with a pipe and stole money and jewelry, prosecutors said.
Napoleon Beazley, 25, had been scheduled to be executed Wednesday for a 1994 murder committed when he was 17, but a Texas court granted a stay just hours before he was to die.
Beazley's case brought international protests because he was a juvenile when he killed the father of a federal judge during a car theft, but Doughtie's execution passed with little notice.
Texas, which put to death a U.S. record of 40 inmates in 2000, has five more executions scheduled this year.
For his final meal, Doughtie requested eight fried eggs, a bowl of grits, biscuits with a bowl of butter, crispy bacon, two sausage patties, a pitcher of chocolate milk, two pints of vanilla ice cream and two bananas.