The 4th Execution of 2025
A Texas man who killed his strip club manager and another
man, then later prompted a massive lockdown of the state prison system when he
used a cellphone smuggled onto death row to threaten a lawmaker, was executed on February 13. 2024.
Richard Lee Tabler, 46, was given a lethal injection at the
state penitentiary in Huntsville. The time of death was 6:38 p.m. CST, 15
minutes after a lethal dose of the powerful sedative pentobarbital was
administered in his arms.
“There is not a day that goes by that I don’t regret my
actions,” Tabler said, strapped to the death chamber gurney, looking at
relatives of his victims who watched through a window a few feet away.
“I had no right to take your loved ones from you, and I ask
and pray, hope and pray, that one day you find it in your hearts to forgive me
for those actions,” Tabler said. “No amount of my apologies will ever return
them to you.”
He expressed to love to his family and friends, lawyers and
supporters, and he thanked prison officials for their compassion and “the
opportunity to show you that I can change and become a better man and
rehabilitate.”
After apologizing several more times and saying this was the
beginning of a new life for him in heaven, he told the warden: “I am finished.”
As the drugs began, he mouthed once again, “I’m sorry,” then
began breathing quickly. After about a dozen breaths, all movement stopped.
Tabler — the second
person executed in Texas in a little over a week, with two more
scheduled by the end of April — was condemned for the Thanksgiving 2004
shooting deaths of Mohammed-Amine Rahmouni, 28, and Haitham Zayed, 25, in a
remote area near Killeen in Central Texas.
Rahmouni was the manager of a strip club where Tabler worked
until he was banned from the place. Zayed was a friend of Rahmouni, and police
said both men were killed in a late-night meeting to buy some stolen stereo
equipment that was actually a planned ambush.
Tabler also confessed to killing two teenage girls who
worked at the club, Tiffany Dotson, 18, and Amanda Benefield, 16. He was
indicted but never tried in their killings.
Dotson’s father, George, was among the witnesses. He
declined to comment on Tabler’s apologies, saying he needed time to process
what he had just seen but was glad to have seen it.
“I couldn’t wait,” he said. “It took me 20 years to get
here.”
“Today is for Tiffany,” said her godfather, Tom Newton. “And
this is justice.”
Tabler had repeatedly asked the courts that his appeals be
dropped and that he be put to death. He also has changed his mind on that point
several times, and his attorneys have questioned whether he is mentally
competent to make that decision. Tabler’s prison record includes at least two
instances of attempted suicide, and he was previously granted a stay of
execution in 2010.
“Petitioner has spent the last twenty years in the Courts,
and see’s no point in wasting this Courts time, nor anyone else’s,” Tabler
wrote to the state Court of Criminal Appeals on Dec. 9, 2024 after his current
execution date was set.
Tabler’s death row phone
calls in 2008 to state Sen. John Whitmire, who is now the mayor of Houston,
prompted an unprecedented lockdown of more than 150,000 inmates in the the
nation’s second-largest prison system. Some were confined to their cells for
weeks while officers swept more than 100 prisons to seize hundreds of items of
contraband, including cellphones.
Whitmire led a Senate committee with oversight of state
prisons, and said at the time that Tabler warned him that he knew the names of
his children and where they lived. Whitmire, through a spokesperson at the
mayor’s office, declined to comment on Tabler’s pending execution.
The ACLU appealed Tabler’s case to the U.S. Supreme Court
last year, claiming he was denied adequate legal representation during his
lower court appeals by attorneys who refused to participate in hearings at what
they said was his request.
The ACLU appeal argued that Tabler’s attorneys ignored a
psychological exam that determined he had a “deep and severe constellation of
mental illnesses ” that had been ignored since childhood. The court refused to
halt his execution.
The club Tabler worked at was called TeaZers. Investigators
said he had a conflict with his boss, Rahmouni, who allegedly said he could
have Tabler’s family “wiped out” for $10.
Tabler recruited a friend, Timothy Payne, a soldier at
nearby Fort Cavazos, and lured Rahmouni and Zayed to a meeting under the guise
of buying the stolen stereo equipment. Tabler shot them both in their car, then
pulled Rahmouni out and had Payne video him shooting Rahmouni again.
Tabler later confessed to the killings. During the sentencing
phase of his trial, prosecutors introduced Tabler’s written and videotaped
statements saying he also killed Dotson and Benefield days later because he was
worried they would tell people he killed the men.
Investigators said that before he was arrested, Tabler
called the Bell County Sheriff’s office to taunt deputies about the murders and
threatened to kill more employees and undercover law enforcement at the strip
club.
Also Thursday, in Florida, a man convicted of killing a
husband and wife during a fishing trip at a remote farm while their toddler
looked on was
put to death by lethal injection in that state’s first execution this
year.
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