US Supreme Court asked to stop Texas execution

HUNTSVILLE, Texas — Lawyers for a Texas prisoner scheduled to die Tuesday for fatally shooting two people inside a Houston crack house asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop his lethal injection because he is mentally impaired, making him ineligible for execution.

Milton Mathis, 32, was convicted for a shooting spree that killed Travis Brown III, 24, and Daniel Hibbard, 31, less than two weeks before Christmas in 1998. A 15-year-old girl also was shot and paralyzed.

Mathis would be the sixth prisoner executed in Texas this year and among at least nine with execution dates in the coming weeks.

He told jurors who decided he should die that he shot Brown in self-defense because Brown had threatened to shoot him, then opened fire on the others because he panicked. The girl's mother, who also was at the crack house, testified that she could have been killed but Mathis ran out of ammunition as he tried to shoot her. At the time of the shootings, Mathis was on probation for aggravated robbery.  More   PrisonerPal.com   True Crime Today  Magazine Subscriptions for Prisoners since 1975