Texas executed a man with an IQ of 61 last week for murdering a 21-year-old police drug informant in 1992. 
 
 Lawyers for Marvin Wilson, 54, had battled his execution for years, building a mountain of appeals that Texas prosecutors demolished again and again until the executioner finally strapped him down. There, Wilson uttered his last words on Earth: 
 
 “Y'all do understand that I came here a sinner and leaving a saint,” he said. “Take me home, Jesus, take me home, Lord, take me home, Lord. I ain't left yet, must be a miracle. I am a miracle. I see you, Rich. Don't cry, son, don't cry, baby. I love y'all. I'm ready.” 
 
 Then Wilson was dead, the seventh inmate executed in the state this year and the latest in a long line of convicts whose last words have been preserved for posterity by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. 
 
 Published on the department’s website, the inmates’ last prayers, apologies and insults form a 30-year database of grief and outrage, studded with protests of innocence and requests for absolution. Taken together, they form a kind of gallows poetry in verses both long and short. 
 
 Charles William Bass, executed April 12, 1986, kept his to eight words: “I deserve this. Tell everyone I said goodbye.” 
 
 “Is the mic on?” Dale Devon Scheanette asked on Feb. 10, 2009. Known as the “Bathtub Killer,” he was convicted of raping and strangling one woman and suspected of raping and drowning another. "My only statement is that … no cases are error free. You may proceed, warden." 
 
 His executioner did, filling Scheanette with lethal poison until his heart stopped. 
 
 On July 9, 1985, Henry Porter faced down his executioners. “From there you call me a cold-blooded murderer,” he said. “I didn’t tie anyone to a stretcher. I didn’t pump any poison into anybody’s veins from behind a locked door. You call this justice. I call this and your society a bunch of cold-blooded murderers.” 
 
 Kelsey Patterson seemed confused by the invitation to speak. “Statement to what? State what?” Patterson said on May 18, 2004. 
 
 He insisted he was innocent of shooting two people to death. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles had recommended clemency to Gov. Rick Perry, who rejected it. Part of Patterson’s protest -- “Go to hell” -- has been redacted from the record because Texas officials deemed his profanity insensitive. 
 
 Patterson's last words: “Get my money. Give me my rights. Give me my rights. Give me my rights. Give me my life back." 
 
 By and large, however, Texas convicts have gone peacefully. Inmate after inmate has apologized for their crimes, for taking the lives of victims who never got the chance to utter last words of their own. Some convicts used the opportunity to proclaim the glory of God and to tell their families that they loved them. 
 
 “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted,” Larry Davis said on July 31, 2008. “It is finished.” 
 
 Davis and two other men perpetrated a 1995 robbery-murder in which the victim, Michael Barrow, was hit in the back of the head with a dumbbell, tied up, stabbed with a knife, stabbed with an ice pick, stabbed with a butcher knife, struck with a pipe and kicked. Finally, Davis told an accomplice to step on Barrow’s throat to suffocate him. 
 
 In 2011, Humberto Leal asked for forgiveness, said he was truly sorry, and said: “Let's get this show on the road.” 
 
 Then he added: “One more thing: Viva Mexico. Viva Mexico.” 
 
 An analysis finds “love” is the most common word in Texas’ execution chamber, followed by “family,” “thank,” “sorry” and “God.” 
 
 “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you too bro,” Rogelio Cannady said on May 19, 2010, addressing his family. “Take care of y’all. May God have mercy on my soul.” 
 
 Cannady kept talking as he faded out. 
 
 “I thought it was going to be harder than this," he said. "I am ready to go. I am going to sleep now. I can feel it, it's affecting me now." ||||| (CNN) A man convicted of a series of rapes and murders in Texas had asked authorities to carry out his execution using gas or a firing squad before he was put to death on Wednesday. 
 
 Danny Paul Bible, known as the "ice pick killer," died of lethal injection, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said. 
 
 The 66-year-old had appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court, arguing that he was "very weak and sick" and that his veins were not capable of sustaining the infusion of lethal injection drugs, making them likely to "blow," a court petition filed by his attorneys stated. 
 
 Bible's attorneys said the likelihood of a botched execution was very high due to his declining health, adding that he would suffer serious pain. 
 
 A judge for the Southern District of Texas in Houston and the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals had dismissed his appeal before the Supreme Court denied a stay of execution petition on Wednesday, court records show. 
 
 'It hurts' 
 
 After receiving the lethal injection, Bible breathed heavily for about two minutes, shaking from Parkinson's tremors as he muttered "it hurts," a media witness said. 
 
 Keri Blakinger, a media witness from the Houston Chronicle, said Bible then started snoring and closed one eye before he stopped moving. 
 
 Jeremy Desel, a public information officer for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said he heard him saying quietly what sounded like "burning" and "hurts." 
 
 Desel said Bible declined last words and he was pronounced dead at 6:32 pm (local time). 
 
 "Danny Paul Bible is as vile and evil a person who has ever drawn breath. We are glad to have witnessed him draw his last breath. I know that he will burn in hell for eternity," Larry Lance, the brother of one of Bible's victims said in a statement following the execution. 
 
 The 'ice pick killer' 
 
 Bible was a serial rapist and murderer who stabbed at least two women to death with ice picks, officials said. 
 
 In 1979, Bible raped and stabbed his cousin's best friend. The body of 20-year-old Inez Deaton, a wife and mother of a 2-year-old girl, was found in a field in Harris County, Texas, records show. 
 
 Authorities say Bible also "left a trail of carnage" in 1983 when he killed two other women and the four-month-old son of one of them on the same day. 
 
 Danny Bible 
 
 Bible was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the murder of one of the women but was paroled in 1992. Following his release, he was accused of raping five young family members, officials said. 
 
 Deaton's murder went unsolved for nearly two decades until Bible was arrested in Louisiana for another rape and confessed to multiple crimes, including Deaton's murder. 
 
 In 2003, Bible was convicted of Deaton's murder and sentenced to death. 
 
 "Some criminals' actions are so heinous, they earn the label 'worst of the worst,'" Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg had said prior to Bible's execution. 
 
 Firing squad or lethal gas 
 
 Bible was asking for either death by gas or firing squad, which are not offered in Texas but are available in a few other states. 
 
 Oklahoma recently decided to use inert gas inhalation as the primary method for death penalty executions after struggling to find legally obtainable lethal injection drugs. 
 
 The state has chose nitrogen to carry out the executions. Nitrogen is one of several inert gases that can cause hypoxia, an oxygen deficiency that causes death. 
 
 Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter said the inert gas inhalation is used in countries that have legalized assisted suicide. 
 
 At least five other states allow gas inhalation but only as an alternative to the lethal injection, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. 
 
 Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah also allow inmates to choose a firing squad for executions, though lethal injection is the primary method in those, according to the center. 
 
 In 2010, Ronnie Lee Gardner was executed by a firing squad in Utah. He was the third inmate in that state to be executed by that method since 1977. 
 
 Last year, Mississippi authorized a firing squad, electrocution and the gas chamber as other means of execution if lethal injection is not available in the state. ||||| HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — A man who escaped prison in his native Mexico while serving a murder sentence was executed in Texas on Wednesday for fatally beating a former Baylor University history professor and attacking his wife more than 16 years ago. 
 
 Ramiro Hernandez-Llanas, 44, was lethally injected in the state's death chamber in Huntsville. 
 
 He was in the U.S. illegally when he was arrested for the October 1997 slaying of 49-year-old Glen Lich. Just 10 days earlier, Lich had given Hernandez-Llanas a job helping with renovations at his ranch near Kerrville, about 65 miles northwest of San Antonio, in exchange for living quarters. 
 
 Investigators said Hernandez-Llanas lured Lich from his house by telling him that there was a problem with a generator, then repeatedly clubbed him with a piece of steel rebar. Armed with a knife, he then attacked Lich's wife. She survived and testified against Hernandez-Llanas, who also had been linked to a rape and a stabbing. 
 
 Strapped to a gurney inside the death chamber, Hernandez-Llanas asked for forgiveness. He also said he was at peace and thankful for being able to see relatives, and he urged them not to be sad. 
 
 "I'm happy... I am sorry for what I have done," he said, speaking in Spanish during a nearly five-minute final statement. "I'm looking at the angel of God." 
 
 He raised his head from the gurney three times and blew three loud kisses toward a brother, a sister and two friends watching through a window. He also thanked prison officers and the warden. 
 
 "I say this with a lot of love and happiness: I have no pain and no guilt. All I have is love," he said. 
 
 As the lethal drug took effect, he snored loudly twice, then appeared to go to sleep. Within seconds, all movement stopped. He was pronounced dead 11 minutes later, at 6:28 p.m. 
 
 Lich's son, who also witnessed the execution, declined to speak with reporters afterward. 
 
 Hernandez-Llanas was the second Texas inmate to receive a lethal injection of a new supply of pentobarbital. Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials have refused to identify the source of the powerful sedative, contending secrecy is needed to protect the drug's provider from threats of violence from capital punishment opponents. The U.S. Supreme Court backed the state's position in a related case last week. 
 
 Texas and other states that have the death penalty have been scrambling for substitute drugs or new sources for drugs for lethal injections after major drugmakers — many based in Europe with longtime opposition to the death penalty — stopped selling to prisons and corrections departments. 
 
 Hernandez-Llanas' appeals were exhausted, and the Texas parole board on Tuesday refused to delay his death sentence or commute it to life in prison. 
 
 He was among more than four dozen Mexican citizens awaiting execution in the U.S. when the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, ruled in 2004 that they weren't properly advised of their consular rights when arrested. A measure mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court to enforce that ruling has languished in Congress. 
 
 On Wednesday, the Mexican government's Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a statement condemning the execution. 
 
 "This is the fourth case of a Mexican being executed in clear violation of the judgment of the International Court of Justice," the ministry said. "The Government of Mexico expresses its most vigorous protest at the failure to comply." 
 
 But that issue never surfaced in Hernandez-Llanas' appeals, which focused primarily on claims that his mental impairment made him ineligible for the death penalty. Testimony from psychiatrists who said he was not mentally impaired and would remain a danger was faulty, his attorneys argued. 
 
 According to trial testimony, Hernandez-Llanas was arrested just hours after the attacking Lich and his wife. He was sleeping in the bed where he had wrapped his arm around the terrorized woman, who managed to wriggle from his grasp and restraints without waking him and call police. 
 
 Evidence showed Hernandez-Llanas was in Texas after escaping from a Mexican prison, where he was serving a 25-year sentence for a 1989 bludgeoning murder in Nuevo Laredo. He was linked to the rape of a 15-year-old girl and a stabbing in Kerrville. While awaiting trial, evidence showed he slashed another inmate's face with a razor blade. In prison, he was found with homemade weapons. 
 
 "This is exactly why we have the death penalty," Lucy Wilke, an assistant Kerr County district attorney who helped prosecute Hernandez-Llanas, said ahead of the execution. "Nobody, even prison guards, is safe from him." 
 
 Hernandez-Llanas was the sixth prisoner executed this year in Texas, the nation's busiest death penalty state.
– You know you have just minutes to live. What do you say? If you're about to be executed in Texas, you most often mention love, family, life, or God—and that you're "sorry." Those are the words that most frequently pop up in the farewells of inmates before they're put to death in the state. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice preserves every offender's final statement from the last 30 years on its website, and there are plenty of statements to read through, because Texas has executed nearly 500 people since 1982. The Los Angeles Times takes a look. A sampling: "Tonight we tell the world that there are no second chances in the eyes of justice," killer carjacker Napoleon Beazley said before he was executed in 2002.Tonight, we tell our children that in some instances, in some cases, killing is right. No one wins tonight. No one gets closure. No one walks away victorious." Before 54-year-old Marvin Wilson, a man with an IQ of 61, was executed last week for killing a police informant, he said: “Y'all do understand that I came here a sinner and leaving a saint. Take me home, Jesus. I love y'all. I'm ready." In 1985, cop killer Henry Porter asked: "You call me a cold-blooded murderer? I didn’t tie anyone to a stretcher. I didn’t pump any poison into anybody’s veins. I call this and your society a bunch of cold-blooded murderers.” Another cop killer, Charles William Bass, executed in 1986, was much harder on himself. "I deserve this," he said. "Tell everyone I said goodbye." Double murderer Rogelio Cannady told everyone present from his family that he loved them, then added as he faded: "I thought it was going to be harder than this. I am ready to go." But killer rapist Rodrigo Hernandez said as he was being executed earlier this year: "This stuff stings. God almighty."