At 49, William Keith Speer spent all but the first 16 years of his life behind bars – most of them awaiting the death penalty.
Speer’s execution — for strangling another inmate to death on the alleged instructions of his former prison gang leader — is scheduled for today. But Sammie Martin, the sister of the man Speer killed when he was 22, asked the state of Texas to delay his execution.
“I have spent a lot of time thinking about the justice my brother and my family deserve,” Martin wrote in a letter filed in federal court earlier this week, the Associated Press reported. “I feel in my heart that he not only regrets his actions, but he has done good deeds for others and still has something to offer the world.”
In July 1997, Speer and Anibal Canales, Jr. (who is also on death row) strangled Gary Dickerson, a 47-year-old inmate, to death in his cell, according to Speer’s online death row information.
“I’m so aware of the things I’ve done,” Speer, who was sentenced to life in prison at age 16 for the fatal shooting of his friend’s father, said in a video he submitted earlier to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. this month. “I am so aware of the pain and hurt that I have caused. I can only say ‘I’m sorry’.”
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Speer grew up under severe physical, emotional and sexual abuse, according to friends and family interviewed in the video. His father forcibly injected him with meth during his childhood, while his stepfather – who later killed his mother – lit him with cigarettes, say his supporters. Around the age of 9 or 10, Speer was sexually abused by a 16-year-old boy.
As a teenager, Speer became convinced that his friend’s father was abusing him, and he killed his father in response, supporters say. The 16-year-old was thrown into the Harris County Jail with adult inmates, was found ready to stand trial as an adult and, according to his online record, was convicted of 1 count of capital murder with a deadly weapon.
Former photograph of William Keith Speer, circa 1997.
Texas Department of Criminal Justice
Growing up behind bars, Speer joined a prison gang, according to the video, which led to his second murder conviction, for which he was sentenced to death about 22 years ago.
But the 6-foot, 215-pound man, who only had an eighth-grade education when he first went behind bars, according to his online record, has begun to turn his life around, according to Speer and Dickerson’s family.
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Speer, who was baptized in a giant kiddie pool in the prison yard, is now a frequent voice on the prison radio’s Faith Based Program at 6 a.m. His supporters say his faith in God gave him the grounded stability he craved growing up, and that he could spend the rest of his life in prison working as a preacher, making the lives of other inmates better, as he had already begun to do as an official mentor among his fellow inmates.
“It all boils down to: is our world a better place with him or without him?” said Reggie, a former inmate who knew him from the Harris County Jail and was interviewed by the Texas Defender Service on video. “And that’s nonsense. It’s a better place with him. Period.”
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Huntsville “Walls” Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Huntsville Unit, where the death chamber is located.
Aaron M. Sprecher via AP
Dickerson’s sister — his only surviving sibling, according to the AP — has changed her mind about Speer since she testified at his murder trial. Although her brother’s death has torn her family apart, she does not believe justice for her brother’s killing will be found in the death of his killer, she told the court this week.
But lawyers for the Texas attorney general’s office responded in court filings this week that “the state retains its interest in deterring gang killings and prison violence, as well as in getting justice for Dickerson,” the AP reported.
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Twenty inmates in five states have been put to death nationwide so far this year, according to a list of executions updated earlier this month by the Death Penalty Information Center. More than half of those executions took place in Florida and Speer’s home state of Texas. If Speer’s execution goes ahead as planned, he would become the seventh person executed by Texas this year.
“No one has the right to – any of this,” Speer said in a video in which he pleaded with the state for his life. “I am looking for this opportunity to give more – to give back. Not because I did something and got the right to make a different change. I’m not saying that at all. But what I’m looking for is a chance to give the love I’ve been given.”
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Source: HIS Education