"Forgive them, sir, as they do not know what they do": the last words of a run in Texas

Larry Swearingen pleaded not guilty until his last breath. "Forgive them, sir, because they do not know what they do," he said Wednesday in a few seconds. executed for violation and murder of a young woman in 1998.

Swearingen, 48, was pronounced dead at 6:47 pm local time after receiving a lethal injection at Huntsville Prison (near Houston), according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

The victim in the case Melissa Trotter was a 19-year-old university student who disappeared on December 8 1998. She was last seen by one of her teachers when she left the library in the company of a man.

Swearingen quickly became the main suspect in Trotter 's disappearance after friends of the victim identified him, which led to his arrest on 11 December.

According to attorney Kelly Blackburn, they knew each other and Swearingen killed Trotter because she "I did not want to sleep with him".

It was not until January 2 that the hunters found Trotter's body in the Sam Houston National Forest, about 160 km north of Houston. The young woman had been raped and strangled with a medibacha of average type.

The evidence against Larry Swearingen

During the investigation, the authorities gathered evidence against Swearingen, revealing at their home the discovery of a medibacha What they said was that the couple had a habit of strangling Trotter and a pack of cigarettes and the lighter of the young woman.

Also a call made by a repeater near the place where the body or fibers were found proving that Trotter was in the van of Swearingen.

However, Swearingen defended his innocence until the time of his execution and his lawyers argued that the evidence presented by the prosecutors with whom he had been sentenced to death were "charlatans".

"The execution is carried out on the basis of a forensic science that borders on the quack's edge, in fact, it's quackery," said Swearingen's lawyer, James Rytting, Texas Tribune.

In 2017, the authorities discovered that Swearingen had convinced a serial killer of women serving a prison sentence with him death corridor from Texas and that it was going to be executed in a few weeks so that the murder of Trotter be awarded.

He intended that this prisoner, Anthony Shore, known as "turnstile killer"he will leave a posthumous confession that would have sowed the sentence against him.

Swearingen was the fourth run of the year in Texas and the twelfth nationwide.

Since the Supreme Court reintroduced the death penalty in 1976 in the United States. 1,502 prisoners were executed, including 562 in Texas, more than in any other state. Eleven more executions are planned in the south of the country before the end of the year.