Cuban native Yosvanis Valle, 34, was executed by lethal injection Tuesday for his role in the 1999 robbery-slaying of a 28-year-old drug dealer in Houston.
Identified as the leader in a Hispanic prison gang, Valle became the 21st prisoner executed in Texas this year. He was pronounced dead at 6:21 p.m., nine minutes after the lethal drugs began to flow.
Valle had denied fatally shooting 28-year-old Jose Martin Junco at a Houston home in June 1999 but said there was little he could do to avoid lethal injection once he lost appeals in the courts.
“I blame myself. I am not going to blame nobody,” he said, speaking to witnesses alternately in both English and Spanish. “I understand why I am paying this price. I am sorry with all my heart.”
The witnesses Valle spoke to in the death chamber were relatives of Gregory Garcia, 20, killed two months after Junco with a shotgun belonging to Valle, according to evidence.
“I never wanted to kill your family,” he said. “I was forced to do it. I was a gang member.”
Valle’s appeals were exhausted after the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year refused to review his case. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles last week rejected a request from his lawyers that his death sentence be commuted to life in prison.
Junco, known as “Yogi,” was confronted at his Houston home by several men connected to a prison gang who had targeted him for robbery.
Court documents showed the June 1999 holdup was a test devised by Valle to see if one of the gang members, Kenneth Isaac Estrada, had the courage to shoot Junco.
After the shooting, Valle, identified as leader of the group, bragged about how he emptied the 10 shots from his 9 mm pistol into Junco. Evidence showed Estrada shot the victim once.
Estrada was arrested after Junco’s girlfriend identified him as one of the gunmen. She was in the house at the time of the shooting.
Valle was arrested when his fingerprint was found in a car tied to another slaying, one of several authorities tied to him.
Estrada, tried separately, got life in prison.
Valle wasn’t charged with Garcia’s slaying, but prosecutors told Harris County jurors about it to show his propensity for violence, something jurors had to consider in punishment.
Valle grew up in Cuba and came to the U.S. at age 14 to join his father. That was nearly a decade after his father had been expelled from Cuba and came to the U.S. as part of the Marielitos immigration wave in 1980.
At his trial and in appeals, attorneys argued Valle had been abused as a child living in poverty in Cuba, leading to his aggressive behavior, and then had difficulties fitting in when he came to America.
As a juvenile, he was convicted of aggravated assault and was sent to the Texas Youth Commission, then went to state prison with an eight-year sentence for a weapons possession conviction. In prison, he joined the gang La Raza Unida, or A Race United.
Prosecutors said Junco’s robbery and slaying, about two years after Valle was released from prison, was intended to raise money for gang members and their relatives.
Valle, described as a sergeant in the gang, had been out of prison about two years when Junco was shot and robbed of a cookie tin containing money, a small amount of drugs, pornographic photos and two rifles.
Three more Texas prisoners are set to die next week, the first being Harris County man Gerald Cornelius Eldridge who was convicted in the 1993 slaying of his former girlfriend and her 9-year-old daughter.
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The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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