...Until the Supreme Court rules in Baze. This AP report, "Member of group that killed Irving officer must wait for injection ruling," is available from the Dallas Morning News.
Inmate Michael Rodriguez, one of the Texas 7, convicts who escaped from a state prison in 2000 and killed an Irving police officer while on the lam, has dropped his appeals and wants to die.
He can't.
A federal judge signed off on his request Sept. 27, two days after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consider a Kentucky challenge to lethal injection as a means of capital punishment. But now state District Judge Rick Magnis won't set an execution date for Mr. Rodriguez until after the Supreme Court rules on the Kentucky case.
"We probably won't be able to set the date for the first time until probably late next year at the earliest, even though he has volunteered and is otherwise good to go," said Dallas prosecutor Lisa Smith.
Mr. Rodriguez told a psychologist who interviewed him in preparation for a competency hearing that he "had to accept his death sentence and submit to it as payment in order to be forgiven and obtain salvation."
He and six other inmates overpowered workers at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Connally Unit near Kenedy in South Texas on Dec. 13, 2000, and fled in a stolen truck.
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