Raphael Holiday, a 36-year-old Texas man, who was convicted 15 years ago for the deaths of three children, has been executed. Holiday died on Wednesday evening by lethal injection just hours after the Supreme Court rejected an appeal to postpone the execution.
Raphael Holiday was executed in Texas on Wednesday.
According to officials, Mr. Holiday died via lethal injection at the state’s death chamber in Huntsville, Texas at around 8:30 p.m. The killer was executed just hours after an attorney representing him attempted and failed to have the U.S. Supreme Court halt the execution, telling the court that his client’s court-appointed lawyers did not work hard enough to save his life.
Those lawyers explained that they abandoned the case because they knew that it was impossible to win the appeals. Before dying, Holiday, who had always insisted that he was innocent, said:
“Yes, I would like to thank all of my supporters and loved ones. I love you, Love y’all, always going to be with y’all. Thank you Warden.”
Holiday is the 13th inmate executed in 2015 in the Lone Star State, which has accounted for about half the executions so far this year in America. The 36-year-old man was on death row for the murders he committed over 15 years ago.
According to court documents, on September 6, 2000, Holiday set a cabin on fire, which killed his baby girl, Justice Holiday, and her two young half-sisters – Tierra Lynch, 7, and 5-year-old Jasmine DuPaul.
Raphael Holiday was living with Tami Wilkerson, his common-law wife, (the law states that a common law marriage is a man and woman, who live together and claim to be married without having formally registered their relation as a civil or religious marriage), at the time, as she was trying to obtain a restraining order against him for molesting Tierra.
The couple had split, but six months later, Holiday showed up at the Madison County home hoping to reconcile with his ex-wife but when he failed, kidnapped the children’s grandmother and forced her at gunpoint to douse the interior with gasoline and set it on fire. The grandmother survived, but the bodies of the three girls were discovered together in a room.
After igniting the fire, he fled in the grandmother’s car, slammed into a police patrol, then led officers on a chase that lasted for hours until he crashed. While in prison, Holiday repeatedly said he knew nothing about the sexual assault and did not burn the home. He claimed:
“I loved my kids. I never would do harm to any of them.”
Lawyers for the Texas prisoner believed that an electrical problem or a pilot light started the blaze, but the girls’ grandmother told a jury that she saw Holiday starting the flames.
