Texas execution expected to mark nation’s 30th

Texas executed Jamaal Howard, 46, by pentobarbital injection on Wednesday evening for the 2000 robbery and fatal shooting of convenience-store clerk Vickie Swartout in Silsbee. Howard’s lawyers unsuccessfully sought to halt the execution, citing concerns about the condition of Texas’s pentobarbital supply and the recent failed execution of Tennessee inmate Christa Pike, who survived two doses of the drug. Texas courts and the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his appeals, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson publicly dissenting from the Supreme Court’s decision. Howard apologized to Swartout’s family in his final statement and was pronounced dead at 8:03 p.m. Witnesses reported that he gasped, coughed and snored as the drug took effect.