Texas death row inmate Danny Bible loses at US Supreme Court | iNFOnews | Thompson-Okanagan's News Source
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Texas death row inmate Danny Bible loses at US Supreme Court

This undated photo provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice shows death row inmate Danny Bible. The U.S. Supreme Court has refused an appeal from Bible on death row for the 1979 slaying of a woman who went to his house in Houston to use a telephone and was found later stabbed 11 times with an ice pick, raped and dumped on the bank of a bayou. The high court, without comment Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2016, rejected the appeal of 65-year-old Bible. (Texas Department of Criminal Justice via AP)

HOUSTON - The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday refused an appeal from Texas death row inmate Danny Paul Bible, who was convicted of the 1979 icepick slaying of a woman who went to his house in Houston to use a telephone and was found later stabbed 11 times, raped and dumped on the bank of a bayou.

The high court offered no comment on its rejection.

Bible, 65, does not yet have an execution date.

Court records show Bible has confessed to four killings, including 20-year-old Inez Deaton, whose slaying went unsolved for nearly two decades. He wasn't tied to her death until 1998 when he was arrested in Fort Myers, Florida, for a Louisiana rape and told authorities about killing Deaton in Houston and a woman and her baby west of Fort Worth in North Texas.

Bible previously served prison time after pleading guilty in 1984 in Palo Pinto County to killing another woman. Texas Department of Criminal Justice records show he arrived in prison with a 25-year sentence for that slaying plus 20 years for a robbery conviction in Harris County but was released in February 1992 to Montana.

While out of prison on a form of parole known as mandatory supervision, Bible "lived a life of extreme violence," according to a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling earlier this year when Bible's appeal of his death sentence was rejected. It's that appeal that went to the Supreme Court.

At his 2003 capital murder trial in Houston for Deaton's death, prosecutors provided evidence of robberies, thefts, assaults and abductions, including the rape of an 11-year-old girl in Montana and his confessions to repeated sexual assaults of young nieces from 1996 to 1998.

Bible contended in his appeal that his lawyers, during the punishment phase of his capital murder trial in Houston, were deficient for not objecting to prosecutors' re-enacting a rape and how Bible tried to stuff his victim into a duffel bag. He also said in the appeal that he is disabled and in permanent pain after the prison van carrying him to death row in 2003 crashed, killing a corrections officer and the driver of another vehicle involved in the wreck.

Bible's appeals attorney, Margaret Schmucker, said Tuesday that her next option could be to seek clemency from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, although Abbott and previous governors have little history of commuting death sentences to life in prison.

Bible is "not a danger to anybody," Schmucker said. "He can't get out of a wheelchair by himself. He can't lift his arms. He can't do anything."

He also has a Louisiana sentence of life without parole, she said.

News from © The Associated Press, 2016
The Associated Press

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