Posted: 1/4/2005 7:23:36 AM EDT
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Now this guy is alright. I say they let him live a little longer and maybe he will do us taxpayers a favor. Convicted killer ready to die Tuesday By MICHAEL GRACZYK Associated Press Writer LIVINGSTON, Texas (AP) -- Convicted killer James Porter insists he doesn't have a death wish but was volunteering for execution Tuesday evening to accept responsibility for killing another Texas prison inmate nearly five years ago. "Stand up, face it, get over it and go on, and that's basically what I've done," Porter, 33, told The Associated Press recently from death row of his decision to forgo appeals and clear the way for his lethal injection. Porter's execution in Huntsville would be the first of the year in the nation's most active capital punishment state, where 23 inmates were put to death in 2004. He's one of at least nine condemned men in Texas with execution dates already this year, including four in January. At Porter's request, no late appeals went to the courts and no clemency petition was filed with state officials, his lawyer, Robin Norris, said. "He prefers to be executed to the alternative of long-term life incarceration," Norris said Monday. Porter, from the Dallas area, figured he did society a favor by fatally beating Rudy Delgado, 40, a convicted child molester, even though he wound up on death row for the slaying. Porter was serving a 45-year term for the 1995 fatal shooting of a transient in Denton County at the time of the May 2000 attack. Court records show he used a rock he smuggled into his cell at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Telford Unit near Texarkana to beat Delgado, who was serving a 15-year term for sexually assaulting a child in Dallas County. "Dude was a homosexual," Porter said. He "asked me several times if that was something I might dig. One day, frustration started eating on me, like a little old black shroud covering my eyes. I'm going to kill someone. "I guess at that time I just lost all my cool and didn't care any more." Delgado's head was battered with the rock and by kicks from Porter. The victim also was stabbed in the neck. Before his capital murder trial, Porter wrote James Elliott, the assistant district attorney in Bowie County, and said he should be praised for killing Delgado. "I said: 'Hey man, you should give me a certificate of accomplishment for taking this dude out instead of trying to kill me,' " he recalled, adding that the district attorney used the note against him, telling jurors Porter was boasting and proud of the slaying. "In a way, I was," Porter said. "That dude never touched any little boys again." Porter also wrote he would kill again if he didn't get the death penalty. "I think he was pretty well determined to get out of the system by murder and that's what he did," Elliott said. Porter, whose extensive tattoos touted what he said was former allegiance to white supremacist prison gangs, said while he had no regrets at the time, he now believes he was "wrong to judge" his victim. "It wasn't my place to re-punish him for something he was already punished for," Porter said. "I'm sorry it happened. That's all I can say." Norris said Porter long suffered depression resulting from an abusive childhood. He eventually ran away from his home in Lake Dallas, where he dropped out of school in the eighth grade. A burglary conviction in Denton County got him a five-year prison term and he was on parole from that conviction when he and a brother were arrested and convicted for killing the transient and dumping the man's body down a water well. "I made my peace with God," Porter said of his decision to voluntarily die. "I thought about it for a while. I prayed on it. You can't run from your mistakes forever." http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/T/TX_TEXAS_EXECUTION_TXOL-?SITE=TXSAE&SECTION=STATE&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT |