HOUSTON — On an April night in 1975, 22-year-old college student Mike McMahan and his friend Deia Sutton were robbed at gunpoint, then shot near a riverbank south of downtown Dallas.
McMahan died after one of the assailants, Ronald Chambers, bludgeoned him with the butt of a shotgun. Sutton was left for dead after the second attacker, Clarence Williams, choked and tried to drown her in the river. She dragged herself to a hotel and called police.
Williams and Chambers were arrested within days of the attack. Williams is serving two life sentences. Chambers was sentenced to death in 1976 by a jury that took 15 minutes to convict him.
Thirty-one years and three trials later, Chambers is still on death row, Texas' longest-serving death house inmate.
Last week, three days before he was scheduled to die by lethal injection, Chambers won a temporary reprieve from the U.S. Supreme Court, which is considering another case that could affect his.
"It's like there's no end in sight," Mike McMahan's sister, Janna, said from her home in Washington state. "There's never any peace with this, but you want to put that fight behind; you want that chapter over with. This has been never-ending, but no way in hell will I ever give up."
Chambers has been on death row three times longer than the U.S. average of about a decade between sentencing and execution.
A number of inmates have been on death row for more than 20 years, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center in Washington. In Texas, 15 of the 391 inmates on death row have awaited execution for more than 25 years; in California, 32 of the 655 condemned have been there more than 25 years. The longest-serving death row inmate in the U.S. is Gary Alvord, a Florida killer sentenced to death in 1974.
Though Chambers, the Texas inmate, hasn't volunteered to die or abandon his appeals, neither has he done anything to slow the case as it wound through the courts, said his lawyer, James Volberding. "This is how the system works. He has not unnecessarily dragged out his case, but here he is."
Chambers' first sentence was thrown out because a psychologist hired by the prosecution didn't warn Chambers that his answers could be used against him by the state. At a second trial, in 1985, Chambers was again condemned to death. That sentence was reversed when a court found that prosecutors had improperly excluded three blacks from the jury.
