Man executed in deaths of two Florida men

Robbie Byrd

Roy Pippin continued his protest of what he called the “idiotic behavior” of corrections officers – a protest he had upheld throughout his 11-year stay on death row – by setting fire to his cell only hours before his execution.

Pippin, 51, was executed Thursday evening for the 1994 slayings of two Florida men. Pippin was a part of a Columbian-linked drug organization that moved millions of dollars of drug money into the U.S.

Minutes before taking his last breath, Pippin asked for God’s forgiveness of the jury, trial judge, prosecutor, the Criminal Court of Appeals, and the federal and Supreme courts, charging “each and every one of you with the murder of an innocent man.”

“You will answer to your maker when God has found out that you have executed an innocent man,” Pippin said with an iron-willed voice. “May God have mercy on your souls.

“Go ahead, Warden. Murder me,” Pippin said before concluding his statement with “Jesus, take me home.”

Pippin was pronounced dead at 6:42 p.m., eight minutes after the lethal triple cocktail began.

According to a report from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Pippin began piling trash in front of his cell door at the Polunsky Unit’s Death Row in Livingston at about 10:30 a.m. today.

Using a piece of copper wire he stuck into an electrical outlet, Pippin sat fire to the pile at around 10:45 a.m.

According to Michelle Lyons, TDCJ’s public information director, Pippin was being watched by video camera from his solitary cell, which has a solid door with only a window looking out over the cell block. Corrections officers entered the room shortly after Pippin sat the fire and extinguished it with a hose.

Pippin was taken to a medical clinic at the unit, where he was treated for smoke inhalation.

In a interview from death row Pippin had vowed not to cooperate in his execution.

“I’m going to fight, literally,” he said.

But when he arrived at the Huntsville Unit here he was more subdued.

“I promise you, my oath, I won’t try to hurt any guards,” he said.

TDCJ officials said he was taken uneventfully from his holding cell and that Pippin was not abusive and cooperated with the “Tie-Down” team, corrections officers responsible for securing inmates to the lethal injection gurney.

Prison officials credited talks he had throughout the afternoon with a prison chaplain as calming him before the execution.

Pippin had been protesting his forthcoming execution by initiating a nearly six-week hunger strike which he broke Monday, when TDCJ officials said Pippin ate a piece of carrot cake and a sandwich purchased by a friend from a vending machine in the prison’s visiting area.

The most recent hunger strike was not Pippin’s first. Letters from Pippin posted to the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty’s website said that Pippin went on a hunger strike note that Pippin has held at least two hunger strikes in the last 6 years.

Pippin is the 11th person executed this year in Texas, home of the most active death chamber in the nation.

Pippin was disenchanted with his legal help and filed many appeals himself, writing them in his cell and sending them to the courts by dropping them in the mail.

“The odds are astronomical,” he said. “But I swear to you, if I was guilty of what they said I did, I wouldn’t haven’t a problem at all. I wouldn’t be doing all this legal work. I wouldn’t be fighting.

“No one in their right mind would live in this existence.”

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied his appeal challenging the lethal injection method as unconstitutionally cruel and refused to stop the punishment.

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected three late appeals challenging the Texas sentencing law and arguing the killings of the two men were ordered by Colombian drug lords and that Pippin was under their pressure at the time of the shootings.

“He got dragged int this, “ said attorney Winston Cochran. “Basically, it was kill or be killed. That could be considered mitigating.”

Evidence showed Elmer Buitrago, 34, and his cousin, Fabio, 55, were held captive at a Houston motel for about a week, then before dawn on May 4, 1994, were taken to a warehouse rented by Pippin where each was shot four times.

Elmer Buitrago, however, didn’t die immediately, and was able to tell police Pippin was the gunman.

Pippin, who claimed to have moved as much as $600 million in drug proceeds, blamed the slayings on others in the drug ring.

“I was under duress,” Pippin said. “They said they were going to kill my family.”

“He’s got critical words for everybody,” said Julian Ramirez, the Harris County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Pippin. “Pippin himself testified, the jury got to hear his tale and explanation and rejected it.”

Among witnesses who testified against him was a man who had been tortured at the warehouse and managed to flee. Authorities said another man believed held at the warehouse was found dead in nearby Fort Bend County. Pippin was not charged with that slaying.

Three more convicted killers are to die in Texas in April, starting with James Clark, 38, who has an April 11 execution date for the 1993 robbery, rape and fatal shooting of Catherine Crews, a 17-year-old high school student from Denton.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.