Suzanne Basso held back tears and
smiled at her friends as she became the fourteenth woman to be executed in
America since the resumption of capital punishment.
The 59-year-old woman was found
guilty in 1999 of leading a group of thugs to viciously torture and murder
Louis 'Buddy' Musso, a mentally disabled man she convinced to move with her to
Texas with the promise of marriage.
Executions of women are uncommon in
the U.S. and only five women in Texas have been put to death since the Supreme
Court resumed capital punishment in 1976
Texas, which executes the most death
row convicts out of any state, has stopped giving last meal requests so Basso
had the same dinner as all the other inmates: baked chicken,
fish, boiled eggs,
carrots, green beans, and sliced bread.
Basso was led into the execution
room around 2:15pm, wearing her white prison uniform.
When asked by the warden if she had
any last words, Basso said: 'No sir'.
She seemed to be holding back tears
when she smiled at two friends watching through the window. She mouthed a word
to them and nodded before being injected with the lethal drug pentobarbital.
After the lethal injection. Basso
began to snore, though the snoring became less audible and eventually stopped.
She was officially pronounced dead
at 6:26pm, 11 minutes after the drug was administered.
Leading up to the execution, Basso's
lawyer argued that the 59-year-old woman was not mentally competent enough to
face the death penalty because she suffers from delusions, and that the state
statute governing competency was unconstitutionally flawed. He also challenged
the legality of a medical examiner's testimony.
A state judge last month ruled that
Basso had a history of fabricating stories about herself, sought attention and
manipulated psychological tests.
‘She would pretend to be different
things,’ recalled Colleen Barnett, who prosecuted Basso. ‘One setting she would
pretend to be blind. One setting she would pretend she couldn't walk. One
setting
she had the voice of a little girl.
One mental health expert indicated
additional testing over an extended period of time ‘would provide a more
reliable evaluation,’ attorney Winston Cochran said in a federal court filing.
‘Why rush to judgment on Basso?’ he
asked, seeking a punishment delay that was refused Monday by the Texas Court of
Criminal Appeals and a federal judge.
He took his appeals Tuesday to the
5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, one step short of the Supreme Court.
At the competency hearing, a
haggard-looking Basso sporting a cropped haircut testified from a hospital bed
wheeled into a Houston courtroom and talked about a snake smuggled into a
prison hospital in an attempt to kill her.
Cochran said a degenerative disease
has left her paralyzed. Basso, 59, contended her paralysis was the result of a
jail beating years ago.
At the hearing, she acknowledged
representations about her background — that she was a triplet, worked in the
New York governor's office, had a relationship with Nelson Rockefeller — were
untrue. She originally was from the Albany and Schenectady areas of New York.
At her trial, Basso was portrayed as
the ringleader of a group of people who fatally tortured Musso in 1998 to steal
his money.
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