Two convicted killers on death row, including one due to die next week, had their appeals denied by the US Supreme Court. Anthony Shore (pictured) 55, is scheduled for lethal injection on October 18 for murder in 1992
Two convicted killers on death row, including one due to die next week, had their appeals refused by the US Supreme Court.
The high court declined to review appeals from death row inmates Anthony Shore and Robert Pruett with by both set to die by the end of October.
Shore, 55, is scheduled for lethal injection October 18 for the 1992 slaying of a 21-year-old woman in Houston.
Known as the ‘Tourniquet Killer’, Shore confessed to the killing of the 21-year-old woman, two teenage girls and a 9-year-old girl.
He is known in Houston as the ‘Tourniquet Killer’ because his victims were tortured and strangled with handmade tourniquets.
The slayings connected to Shore went unsolved for years until DNA evidence linked him to the sexual assault of two relatives who were juveniles.
He subsequently confessed to the killings and was convicted in 2004 in the slaying of 21-year-old Maria del Carmen Estrada.
Her body was found in 1992 in the drive-thru lane of a Dairy Queen.
Shore’s lawyer, Knox Nunnally, had hoped his client’s death sentence could be reduced to life in prison. He has said Shore suffered from traumatic brain injury.
Pruett, 38, is set to die October 12 for the fatal stabbing of a corrections officer at a South Texas prison in 1999, where he already was serving a 99-year sentence for his involvement in another killing.
Pruett’s attorneys have long questioned the evidence in his case.
Robert Pruett, 38, is due to die on October 12 for the fatal stabbing of a corrections officer at a South Texas prison in 1999, where he already was serving a 99-year sentence for his involvement in another killing
They have sought additional DNA testing of evidence used to convict him of the December 1999 killing of Daniel Nagle, a 37-year-old officer at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s McConnell Unit near Beeville, about 85 miles southeast of San Antonio.
Pruett was serving 99 years for murder at the prison for participating with his father and a brother in a neighbor’s slaying.
Evidence showed the killing of the corrections officer stemmed from a dispute over a peanut butter sandwich that Pruett wanted to take into a prison recreation yard in violation of rules.
Pruett testified at his 2002 trial in Corpus Christi that he was innocent in Nagle’s death.
In 2015, Pruett came within hours of execution before his punishment was stopped by a state judge.