OUWA – Feds Execute Orlando Hall For Kidnapping, Raping And Burying North Texas Teen Lisa Rene Alive In 1994. North Texas teenager Lisa Rene had called police for help as Orlando Hall and 4 other men beat on the door of her home. Hall had gotten stiffed on a drug deal and visited the apartment in Arlington trying to find the 2 brothers who took his money. They weren’t home, but Lisa, their sister, was.
Late Thursday, Hall was put to death for abducting and killing the 16-year-old. His was the eighth federal execution this year since the Trump administration revived a process that had been used just 3 times within the past 56 years. A judge’s sleepover concerns about the execution drug gave Hall a reprieve, except for but six hours. After the Supreme Court overturned the stay, he was put to death just before midnight.
Hall, a changed man in prison consistent with his lawyers and a church volunteer who had grown on the brink of him, was consoling his family and supporters at the top. “I’m OK,” he said during a final statement, then adding, “Take care of yourselves. Tell my kids i really like them.”
As the drug was administered, Hall, 49, lifted his head, seemed to wince briefly, and twitched his feet. He seemed to mumble to himself and twice he opened his mouth wide as if he was yawning. whenever that was followed by short, seemingly labored, breaths. He then stopped breathing. Soon after, a politician with a stethoscope came into the execution chamber to see for a heartbeat before Hall was officially declared dead.
Lisa’s older sister, Pearl Rene, said during a statement that she and her family “are very relieved that this is often over. we’ve been handling this for 26 years and now we’re having to relive the tragic nightmare that our beloved Lisa went through.”
Hall’s attorneys also had sought to halt the execution over concerns that Hall, who was Black, was sentenced on the advice of an all-white jury. The Congressional Black Caucus asked Attorney General William Barr to prevent it because the coronavirus “will make any scheduled execution a tinderbox for further outbreaks and exacerbate concerns over the likelihood of a miscarriage of justice,” consistent with a letter to Barr.
Meanwhile, another judge ruled Thursday that the U.S. government must delay until next year the primary execution of a female federal inmate in almost six decades after her attorneys contracted the coronavirus visiting her in prison. Lisa Montgomery had been scheduled to be put to death on Dec. 8.
Hall was among five men convicted for the abduction and death of Lisa Rene in 1994.
According to court documents, Hall was a marijuana trafficker in Arkansas, who would sometimes buy drugs in North Texas. On Sept. 24, 1994, he met two men at a Dallas-area car wash and gave them $4,700 with the expectation they might return later with the marijuana. the 2 men were Rene’s brothers.
Instead, the lads claimed their car and money were stolen. Hall et al. figured they were lying and were ready to hunt the address of the brothers’ apartment in Arlington.
When Hall and three other men arrived, the brothers weren’t there. Lisa Rene was home, alone.
Court records offer a chilling account of the fear she faced.
“They’re trying to interrupt down my door! Hurry up!” she told a 911 dispatcher. A muffled scream is heard seconds later, with a person saying, “Who you on the phone with?” the road then goes dead.
“She was studying for a test and had her textbooks on the couch when these guys came knocking on the front entrance,” retired Arlington detective John Stanton Sr. recalled. Police arrived within minutes of the 911 call, but the lads were gone, with Rene. Stanton still winces at the near-miss of thwarting the crime in its early stages.
“It was one that I won’t ever forget,” Stanton said. “This one was particularly heinous.”
The men drove to a motel in Arkansas. Rene was repeatedly sexually assaulted during the drive and at the motel over the subsequent two days.
On Sept. 26, Hall and two other men drove Rene to Byrd Lake Natural Area in Pine Bluff, her eyes covered by a mask. They led her to a gravesite that they had dug each day earlier. Hall placed a sheet over Rene’s head then hit her within the head with a shovel. When she ran another man and Hall took turns hitting her with the shovel before she was gagged and dragged into the grave, where she was doused in gasoline before dirt was shoveled over her.
A coroner determined that Rene was still alive when she was buried and died of asphyxiation within the grave, where she was found eight days later.
Crossing the Texas-Arkansas line made the case a federal crime. one among Hall’s accomplices, Bruce Webster, also was sentenced to death, though a court last year vacated the sentence because Webster is intellectually disabled. Three other men, including Hall’s brother, received lesser sentences in exchange for his or her cooperation at trial.
Hall’s lawyers contend that jurors who recommended the execution weren’t told of the severe trauma he faced as a toddler or that he once saved a 3-year-old nephew from drowning by leaping into a motel pool from a balcony.
Donna Keogh, 67, first met Hall 16 years ago when she and other volunteers from her Catholic Church found out a program to supply Christmas presents for youngsters of inmates at the federal prison. they need to correspond ever since.
She doesn’t understand what executing Hall accomplishes.
“My faith tells me that each one life is precious which includes the lives on death house,” Keogh said. “I just don’t see any purpose.”
Five of the primary six federal executions this year involved white men; the opposite was Navajo. Christopher Vialva, who was Black, was put to death on Sept. 24.
Critics have argued that executing white inmates first was a political calculation during a nation embroiled in racial bias concerns involving the criminal justice system, especially within the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis in May.
