Texas executed Jamaal Howard on Wednesday evening in the murder of Vickie Swartout.

Carrying out a death warrant ends the sentence already entered. It is not a new trial. CBS News and the Associated Press reported Texas pronounced Jamaal Howard dead at 8:03 p.m. Wednesday after pentobarbital at the Huntsville Unit, and that he became the 30th person executed in the United States this year. The stay fights failed the same evening. What those courts did not do was reopen the 2000 capital-murder conviction.

CBS News and the Associated Press reported that Jamaal Howard, 46, was pronounced dead at 8:03 p.m. local time Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2026, after receiving a fatal dose of pentobarbital at the state prison in Huntsville. He became the 30th person executed in the United States this year, and the first since Tennessee failed to carry out a lethal injection of Christa Pike. Asked by the warden if he had a final statement, Howard apologized to members of Swartout's family who watched through a window a few feet from him. In that same CBS account, the network wrote that Texas has executed six people so far this year, with two more scheduled after Howard. USA TODAY, reporting earlier Wednesday before the warrant was carried out, had said a completed execution would make him the seventh person executed in Texas this year. The figure CBS and the Associated Press reported after the execution, for the country, is that he was the 30th.

Howard was convicted of capital murder in the killing of Vickie Swartout, 42, who was shot once in the chest during a robbery at a Chevron station in Silsbee, about 100 miles northeast of Houston. CBS News reported the evidence included the store's surveillance video. Court records, as CBS described them, show Howard, then 20, took $114 and a carton of cigarettes. That conviction and that death sentence were already the judgment. Wednesday's injection carried them out.

Earlier Wednesday, Howard's attorneys tried to stop the execution. CBS News reported they argued he is intellectually disabled and that he faced risks similar to Pike's because both states use pentobarbital. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied a stay and later denied a second attempt to stop the execution over the drug. CBS News reported both denials came without elaboration. The U.S. Supreme Court denied a late appeal Wednesday evening without comment. Pike's lawyers said she survived two doses of pentobarbital on Sept. 30, was hospitalized, and as of Tuesday had regained consciousness and was speaking, but could not move her arms or hands. Howard's attorneys wrote that Texas should not be eager to follow Tennessee, and that there was a similar risk the state's drugs were degraded, "far past the original beyond-use dates that the pharmacopeia allows for drugs of this kind." Those filings failed. They did not reopen the capital case.

Amanda Hernandez, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, told CBS News that Howard was "chatty" on the 45-mile drive from death row to the Huntsville Unit. She said he made small talk with the officers through the trip, and that in a holding cell near the death chamber he stayed talkative, asking questions and engaged in the process. That is a spokesperson's account of the drive and the holding cell. It is not a new court order. All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.