A Texas man convicted of fatally stabbing twin 16-year-old girls over three decades ago is scheduled for execution on Tuesday evening. He is also linked to five other killings.
Garcia White was convicted for the December 1989 murders of Annette and Bernette Edwards. The bodies of the twins and their mother, Bonita Edwards, were found in their Houston apartment.
White, 61, a former college football player who later worked as a fry cook, is set to receive a lethal injection Tuesday evening at the state penitentiary in Huntsville. He would be the sixth inmate executed in the U.S. in the last 11 days.
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Testimony revealed that White visited the Edwards’ Houston home to smoke crack with Bonita, who was also fatally stabbed. When the twin girls came out of their room, White attacked them as well, breaking down their locked bedroom door. White was later linked to the deaths of a grocery store owner and another woman, the Associated Press reported.
“Garcia White committed five murders in three different incidents, and two of his victims were teenage girls. This is exactly the type of case for which the death penalty was intended,” said Josh Reiss, chief of the Post-Conviction Writs Division at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office in Houston.
White’s lawyers appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to stop his execution after lower courts rejected his petitions for a stay. On Friday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles denied White’s request to commute his death sentence or grant him a 30-day reprieve.
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His attorneys argue that Texas’ top criminal appeals court has refused to accept “medical evidence and strong factual backing” showing White is intellectually disabled. The Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that executing intellectually disabled individuals is unconstitutional but has allowed states discretion in determining such disabilities. Justices have since debated how much discretion should be permitted.
White’s lawyers also claimed that the Texas appeals court prevented his defense team from presenting critical evidence that could have spared him the death sentence. This includes DNA evidence suggesting another man was at the crime scene and scientific evidence indicating White may have been suffering from a cocaine-induced psychotic break at the time of the killings.
Additionally, White’s attorneys requested a new review of his death sentence, arguing that the Texas appeals court created a new scheme for capital punishment cases after a recent Supreme Court ruling in another Texas death row case.
“Mr. White’s case highlights the flaws in Texas’ current death penalty system — he has evidence of intellectual disability, which the [Texas appeals court] refuses to let him fully develop. He also has significant mitigating evidence that could result in a lesser sentence but has been barred from presenting it,” White’s lawyers argued in their petition to the high court.
In response, the Texas Attorney General’s Office stated that White has not provided sufficient evidence to support his claim of intellectual disability. It also noted that his claims regarding another person at the crime scene and his cocaine use had previously been dismissed by the courts.
“White offers no valid reason to delay his execution any longer. The Edwards family — and the victims of White’s other murders — deserve justice for his decades-old crimes,” the attorney general’s office said.
The murders of the twin girls and their mother remained unsolved for six years until White confessed after his 1995 arrest for the fatal beating of grocery store owner Hai Van Pham during a robbery. White also admitted to the 1989 beating death of Greta Williams.
If the execution proceeds, White will be the fifth inmate executed in Texas this year, and the 19th in the U.S., in 2023.
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