US death penalty on pace to top 40 for a second consecutive year
Two men were set to be executed in the United States on Thursday, one in Oklahoma for the 2001 fatal shooting of an Oklahoma City advertising executive and the other in Texas for the 2003 killings of three young children he had been raising. James Pavatt, 73, was scheduled to die by lethal injection at Oklahoma’s state penitentiary in McAlester, and John Allen Rubio, 46, was set to die later Thursday at the Texas state prison in Huntsville.
The executions were set to take place as the United States moves toward surpassing 40 executions for a second consecutive year, a pace driven by Florida as the death penalty comes under renewed attention. Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced he would commute hundreds of death sentences before leaving office, which experts say would be the largest mass clemency in American history.
Rubio and his girlfriend, Angela Camacho, were accused in the 2003 killings of the three children Rubio was raising: 3-year-old Julissa Quesada, 14-month-old John E. Rubio and 2-month-old Mary Jane Rubio. The children were beheaded in the squalid, windowless apartment they shared in Brownsville, on Texas’ border with Mexico. The killings rattled a community along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Camacho pleaded guilty and is serving a life sentence. According to court records, Rubio was not the biological father of the two older children but treated them as if they were his own.
Rubio’s first capital murder conviction in the killings was overturned by an appeals court, which ruled that statements by Camacho were wrongly allowed as evidence in his trial. Rubio again pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity at his second trial but was once again convicted and sentenced to death.
At various points, Rubio claimed the children were possessed and that he was the “chosen one” intended to save the world. Defense experts diagnosed Rubio as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, a determination rejected by prosecution experts. Defense experts testified that his childhood — which they described as filled with violence at home, “toxic” parents, drug use and prostitution — damaged him developmentally.
The apartment building where the children were killed was later demolished, and the land was turned into a park and a community garden.
Pavatt was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder in the 2001 death of Rob Andrew, a 39-year-old advertising executive fatally shot in the garage of the Oklahoma City home he had previously shared with his wife. Andrew was shot as he picked up the couple’s two young children before Thanksgiving. Pavatt, who attended the same church as the Andrew family, had been having an affair with Andrew’s wife, Brenda Andrew. Pavatt and Brenda Andrew were convicted at separate trials, and each was sentenced to death. Brenda Andrew is currently the only woman on Oklahoma’s death row.
Weeks before the shooting, Rob Andrew told police someone was trying to kill him after the brake lines on his car were cut. After her husband was killed, Brenda Andrew told police that masked intruders shot her in the arm and fatally shot him. Pavatt and Brenda Andrew went to Mexico with her two children after the shooting and were arrested three months later while reentering the United States.
At a clemency hearing last month, Pavatt said he was “not guilty of shooting anyone” and that he had fallen in love with Brenda Andrew and believed “everything she told me.” “It was not until my trial that I began to see the extent to which I had been manipulated by Brenda,” Pavatt told the board. “I can see why the jury believed that we were both involved in Rob’s murder.”
Prosecutors have said Pavatt and Brenda Andrew plotted to kill Rob Andrew, and that no matter who fired the shots, both were equally guilty.