Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Houston, Texas, United States
About Thomas Bartlett Whitaker
- Thomas Bartlett "Bart" Whitaker (born December 31, 1979) is a former Texas death row inmate who spent nearly 11 years at the Polunsky Unit near Livingston.
- He was convicted for the December 10, 2003 murders of his mother and brother by hitman Chris Brashear and sentenced to death in March 2007.
- On February 22, 2018, 45 minutes before the scheduled execution at 6pm, Whitaker had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment without parole by Governor Greg Abbott, the first time Governor Abbott has done so.Whitaker had employed Brashear to carry out the murders.
- Whitaker's father Kent was shot but survived.
- Whitaker fled to Mexico in 2004 following a tip-off that he would shortly be arrested for the murders.
- He lived there for over a year under the false name of Rudy RÃos.
- On September 15, 2005, a capital murder warrant was issued against Whitaker.
- Cooperating with US authorities, Mexican authorities arrested Whitaker without incident under immigration charges.
- In September 2005 Whitaker was handed over to US authorities at the border town of Laredo, Texas, where he was arrested for capital murder.The State of Texas currently executes by overdosing the condemned with pentobarbital from a compounding pharmacy and Whitaker's defense lawyers had claimed the state's first two executions of 2018 were botched because of old lethal injection drugs.
- Whitaker withdrew his appeal pending at the Supreme Court of the United States, pertaining to the purity of the drug used in Texas executions just before the Governor granted clemency and commuted his sentence.In a rare decision on February 20, 2018, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles unanimously recommended that the death sentence be commuted to life imprisonment.
- The recommendation from the seven-member panel was sent to Republican Governor Greg Abbott.
- Abbott accepted their recommendation, and commuted Whitaker's death sentence, noting that Whitaker had, "Voluntarily and forever waived any and all claims to parole in exchange for a commutation of his sentence from death to life without the possibility of parole".
- Abbott cited the fact that Whitaker did not fire the gun and that his father Kent, "Insists that he would be victimized again if the state put to death his last remaining immediate family member", as the reasons for the commutation.
- Whitaker responded to the commutation of his sentence by saying, "I am thankful for this decision, not for me but for my dad".
- Previously, in 2012, Whitaker had stated his strong opposition to the idea of life without the possibility for parole, and wrote in his blog from prison: LWOP, however, offends and assaults everything I believe in.
- It irrevocably denies any possibility of rehabilitation; it eviscerates hope entirely.
- It is for this reason that I would never sign for it, even if that were the only way to evade a return to death row.
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