Texas held its 18th execution of the year Tuesday putting a 50-year-old inmate to death for killing two people in a crack house in 1993. Robert Dale Rowell died by lethal injection shortly after 6 p.m. in the state prison in Huntsville, KWTX-TV in Waco reported. Another execution is scheduled Wednesday. Shannon Thomas was sentenced to death for killing a drug dealer and his two children on Christmas Eve 1993. Rowell, a longtime drug user, had a long criminal record before he went on trial for capital murder. He went to prison in 1980 after exchanging fire with a police officer during a robbery and received an eight-year sentence for killing a fellow inmate. Freed in 1991, Rowell apparently managed to stay clean for two years before getting hooked on crack cocaine. He was convicted of killing his drug dealer, Raymond Mata, and another man, Irving Wright, because he thought Mata had overcharged him. © Copyright 2005 by United Press International

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