Death Row Inmate: I'm Guilty and Deserve to be Executed
A death row inmate who is scheduled to be executed this week in Texas says he is guilty and the punishment is fair.
Convicted along with other “Texas 7” inmates in the murder of a police officer responding to a robbery at a store in Dallas after they escaped from a maximum security prison eight years ago, “I’m guilty of what they said—everything,” Michael Rodriguez, 45, tells the Associated Press in his first, and what he says will be his only, media interview. He was in prison initially for the murder-for-hire killing of his wife.
While it was “thrilling” to escape in December 2000 from a maximum security prison with six other inmates, the situation soon went badly wrong, as the group attempted to rob a sporting goods store in suburban Dallas that had 17 workers inside. A woman outside spotted the unusual activity, and called police. Rodriguez says he ducked under sleeping bags filled with loot when he saw the police car outside, and heard shots he thought were fired at the robbers.
“But no, it was us,” he says, and the officer, he saw, was apparently dead in his police car.
At trial, his lawyers argued that he should be spared the death penalty because he been sexually abused by a Catholic priest when he was in high school. But that wasn’t true, Rodriguez says, and it is right that he should be executed—both for the officer’s murder, and for the killing of his wife, a “wonderful person” who didn’t deserve her fate.
“I need to pay back. I can’t pay back monetarily,” he says. “This is the way.”
