John Allen Rubio is due to be executed in Texas on Thursday, 12 November, after the state’s highest criminal appeals court rejected his latest attempt to halt the lethal injection. Rubio was sentenced to death for killing three young children in Brownsville in 2003.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice lists the 46-year-old inmate’s execution for Thursday at the Huntsville Unit, where executions are carried out. His scheduled date remains in place following the latest court ruling.
John Allen Rubio execution date remains in place
Rubio’s lawyers argued in a motion filed on 28 October that prosecutors had failed to correct allegedly false evidence given by forensic psychiatrist Michael Welner during his 2010 trial. The prosecution said the defence had already raised a similar claim, which was rejected by the appeals court in 2022.
The court’s decision followed a hearing last month in which a judge found Rubio competent to be executed. Experts’ assessments were reviewed as part of the proceedings, with the court concluding that he understood the crime and the punishment imposed on him.
Rubio and his common-law wife, Angela Camacho, were convicted over the deaths of Julissa Angela Quezada, three, John Esteban Rubio, one, and Mary Jane Rubio, two months old. The children were killed in Brownsville on 11 March 2003.
Investigators said Rubio told them he believed the children were possessed by demons. His defence argued at trial that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and had been experiencing delusions.
Rubio was first convicted and sentenced to death in 2003, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the conviction and sentence in 2007 after ruling that evidence had been improperly admitted. He was convicted again at a retrial in 2010 and received a second death sentence.
Camacho was also convicted for her role in the killings and is serving three consecutive life sentences.
