Capital business as usual in Texas

As detailed in this article, all the litigation over lethal injection protocols did not keep Texas from executing another murderer, Robert Neville, on Wednesday.  As the article notes:

About an hour before his scheduled execution time, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his final appeals. His lawyers had hoped to block the execution with appeals in the federal courts that questioned whether the lethal drugs used in the punishment were humane and that Neville suffered a mental illness brought on by lupus that should disqualify him from the death penalty.

The article also details why Texas is on pace to again lead the country in executions in 2006: Neville was "the third prisoner executed this year and the first of three over the next 15 days in the nation's most active capital punishment state."