Texas Executes Mentally Ill Killer of 5

Larry Robison, a mentally ill man who murdered five people in a 1982 killing spree, was put to death by lethal injection Friday night.

Robison, 42, became the fourth person executed this month in Texas, which leads the nation in capital punishment. He died without making a final statement.

Texas Gov. George W. Bush, campaigning in Iowa for the Republican presidential nomination, took no action to stop the execution.

Robison came within a few hours of execution in August, but the punishment was postponed because of questions about his sanity.

Prosecutors argued successfully in a later hearing that Robison could be put to death because he met the legal criteria of understanding why he was being punished.

On Aug. 10, 1982, Robison sexually mutilated and decapitated his Fort Worth roommate, then went next door and killed four neighbors, including an 11-year-old boy.

Several years before the murders, he had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and had been in and out of mental institutions, but prosecutors said he was not insane at the time of the killings. They blamed the murders on Robison’s excessive use of illegal drugs.