(AllHipHop News) Ray Jasper was once an aspiring rapper who proverbially ended his life during a studio session over 15 years ago. This past Wednesday (March 19th), Jasper was executed for murdering a San Antonio studio owner in 1998.
David Alejandro was the owner of the studio Jasper and two friends recorded in for two hours back in 1998. Following the relatively short studio session, Jasper and his friends “slashed Alejandro’s throat from ear to ear, but did not kill him” according to the Texas attorney general’s statement. Jasper and an accomplice killed Alejandro after they proceeded to stab the already injured man.
The three men stole studio equipment valued upwards of $30,000.
Jasper was convicted in 1998 and a little over two weeks before his execution, Gawker released a letter from him as a part of their “Letters From Death Row” series. In the letter, Jasper contended to his innocence, claiming it was the accomplice who murdered Alejandro and not himself.
Jasper was executed by lethal injection around 6:31 CDT. In his final words Jasper wrote to him family:
To my family, we are one. To my beautiful daughter, the best thing that ever happened to me. I love you endlessly. I am you and you are me forever.
Jasper wrote that he completed “several books and screen plays” in an earlier letter to Gawker posted in January. Jasper also spoke on the racial discrimination of jurors in Texas murder cases:
The controversial issue in my case has been narrowed down to racial discrimination concerning the State of Texas purposely striking Black people from the jury panel. Racial discrimination on trial juries has a long-standing history in Texas. It was really made known in the Thomas Miller-el case where Dallas had a guide for their prosecutors to strike all minorities from the jury panel. So it’s about whether the Courts will consider the issue worth halting the execution.
The case he makes reference to is a 2004 case in Dallas, Texas where Thomas Miller-El accused the prosecutors of removing 10 of the 11 African American jurors from jury selection in his capital murder case based on race. He was initially denied the motion and sentenced to the death penalty before the U.S. Supreme Court granted Miller-El certiorari a second time on June 28th, 2004.
On June 13th, 2005, the Court agreed that there was apparent racial discrimination from the prosecutors in jury selection and chose in favor of Miller-El.
