Texas set to execute Ker'Sean Ramey for 2005 triple murder, a week after codefendant's execution

Texas is scheduled to execute Ker'Sean Olajuwa Ramey by lethal injection Wednesday evening in Huntsville, a week after the state put his codefendant to death for the same crime. Ramey, 41, was convicted of capital murder for the August 2005 killings of three people during a robbery that turned up no drugs, according to the prison system's case file. On Monday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted against recommending clemency, leaving Ramey's fate to a pending appeal at the U.S. Supreme Court and to Gov. Greg Abbott, who has the power to grant a one-time, 30-day reprieve but had not done so as of Tuesday evening.

What happened in Edna

On Aug. 24, 2005, Ramey, then 20, and LeJames Norman, then 19, broke into a home in Edna, a small town in Jackson County roughly 100 miles southwest of Houston, believing it held cocaine they could steal. They found no drugs. Before leaving, they shot three people dead with a .22-caliber handgun: Celso Lopez, 38, shot four times, including three times in the back of the head; Tiffani Peacock, 18, shot twice in the head; and Samuel Roberts, 24, shot five times in the chest, neck and head, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's account of the offense.

Norman fled to Mexico and was arrested by U.S. Border Patrol agents when he tried to re-enter the country months later. Prosecutors called him as a cooperating witness against Ramey at Ramey's 2007 trial, along with Ramey's then-girlfriend, who testified that Ramey confessed to her and disposed of two guns in a dam; investigators recovered the weapons, but a ballistics expert could not confirm they were the ones used in the killings. According to a 2021 federal appeals court ruling on Ramey's habeas petition, no fingerprints, DNA, blood or hair evidence connected him to the crime scene or the weapons; the case against him rested almost entirely on witness testimony. A jury convicted him and, after a sentencing phase in which his attorney called only two witnesses, took about 15 minutes to sentence him to death.

The numbers

Ramey's execution, if it proceeds, would be Texas's sixth of 2026 and its second in eight days. Norman was executed on Sept. 16 and declared dead at 6:44 p.m., the state's fifth execution this year. Texas has three more executions scheduled for October and November; if all are carried out, the state's 2026 total would reach nine, its highest in a single year since 2019. In May, Texas carried out its 600th execution since the U.S. reinstated capital punishment in 1976, far more than any other state. Ramey has now spent nearly two decades on death row, having been received into the system in January 2007, according to the state's execution schedule.

An all-white jury and questions about the trial

Ramey's current attorneys, along with death-penalty opponents, point to the conduct of his original trial lawyer, who worked primarily as a dentist and practiced law as a side business, had never before handled a capital case and conducted no mitigation investigation, according to a detailed account of both men's trials. That attorney called no witnesses during the guilt phase and did not present evidence that Ramey had endured physical and emotional abuse as a child or that he had an IQ of 81, evidence that is typically central to a capital sentencing case. His appeals also allege that jailhouse informants who testified against him had undisclosed plea deals with prosecutors.

Ramey's jury included no Black jurors, seating 11 white members and one Hispanic member; Ramey is Black. His lawyers challenged the exclusion of a Black prospective juror, Cheryl Steadham-Scott, who had expressed reservations about the death penalty, as a violation of the Supreme Court's ban on racially motivated jury strikes. State and federal courts, including the Fifth Circuit in 2021, rejected the claim, finding Ramey could not clear the highly deferential legal standard that applies to such challenges in federal habeas review. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied his final state appeal and a stay request this month without addressing the merits of his claims, and his attorneys have since asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.

A disproportionate toll, advocates say

The case has drawn attention beyond Jackson County because of the age of the two men at the time of the crime. Kristin Hould Cuellar, executive director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said she found it troubling that everyone Texas plans to execute through the end of the year, five men in total, is a person of color, and that three of them, including Ramey and Norman, were under 21 when they committed their crimes.

"Even more concerning is the fact that everyone facing execution is a person of color. And another concern is that three of these men were under the age of 21 at the time of the crime. Since 2005, when the Supreme Court banned the death penalty for people under 18 at the time of the crime, Texas has executed 65 people who were either 18, 19, or 20 years old at the time of the crime."

New death sentences for people who were under 21 when they offended have become rare nationally, roughly one a year since 2020, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a research group that tracks capital punishment nationally but does not take a position on it. That trend reflects a broader legal and scientific argument, echoed in appeals for both Ramey and Norman, that brain development linked to impulse control continues into the mid-20s. Courts have so far declined to extend the constitutional ban on executing people who were minors at the time of their crimes to that older age group.

What happens next

Barring intervention, Ramey is set to be executed by lethal injection Wednesday evening at the state penitentiary's Huntsville unit, following the process the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles uses to review last-resort clemency requests. His attorneys' petition remains before the U.S. Supreme Court, which could grant a stay in the hours before the scheduled execution, as it has occasionally done in other Texas cases. Abbott, who was not swayed by the board's recommendation in Norman's case last week, retains sole authority to issue a 30-day reprieve independent of the board's vote, though he has given no public indication he intends to do so. If the execution proceeds, it would leave three more scheduled before the year's end, part of what capital-punishment researchers describe as an unusually heavy fall docket for the state that carries out more executions than any other in the country.