Charles Brooks Jr.: First Lethal Injection in U.S. History

The first lethal injection execution in US history was carried out on Charlie Brooks Jr. at the Walls Unit in Huntsville, Texas, shortly after midnight on December 7, 1982. Brooks, a 40-year-old Fort Worth man convicted of the 1976 kidnapping and murder of auto mechanic David Preston Gregory, was strapped to a hospital gurney and killed with a three-drug intravenous cocktail that no state had ever used on a prisoner before. His death opened what the Death Penalty Information Center later called “the lethal-injection era.”¹

Who Charlie Brooks Jr. Was and the Crime

On December 14, 1976, Brooks and an accomplice named Woodie Loudres went to a used car lot in Fort Worth after their own car broke down. David Gregory, a 26-year-old paint and body repairman working at the lot, was told to accompany Brooks on a test drive. Brooks picked up Loudres during the drive. The two men bound and gagged Gregory, put him in a car trunk, and drove him to Room 17 of the New Lincoln Motel, where he was shot in the face and killed.² Earlier that day, Brooks had threatened the motel owner’s wife with a long-barreled revolver.³

Brooks was charged in Tarrant County with intentional and knowing murder committed during a kidnapping. He and Loudres were tried separately before Judge David Belew. Both were convicted and sentenced to death.²

Who Actually Pulled the Trigger

A central problem hung over Brooks’s execution: no one could say for certain which of the two men fired the fatal shot. The murder weapon was never recovered, and neither defendant identified the shooter at trial.³ Loudres, though also sentenced to death, had his conviction overturned on appeal. He then pleaded guilty to non-capital murder, testified against Brooks, and received a 40-year sentence. He was paroled in 1989 after roughly 11 years.²

The disparity troubled even the prosecution. Jack Strickland, who had tried Brooks, said he had “serious doubts about his personal involvement” and urged that the death sentence be commuted. On the night of the execution, Strickland appeared before a federal judge, filed a sworn deposition with the U.S. Supreme Court and the Fifth Circuit, and asked the Board of Pardons and Paroles to seek a 60-day reprieve from Governor William Clements. “My objection,” he said, “is the disposition of the death penalty in contrast to the sentence of 40 years.”⁴ The Harvard Crimson called the outcome an “absurd” and “sickening disgrace.”⁵

Judge Belew denied the defense motion at 10:49 p.m. Governor Clements refused the traditional 30-day reprieve, and the Board of Pardons and Paroles voted not to intervene. The U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay by a vote of six to three, with Justices Brennan, Marshall, and Stevens dissenting.⁶⁷

Brooks himself never gave a clear answer. Interviewed by journalist Dick Reavis for Texas Monthly, he said, “I regret my participation in the events of that day,” and later added, “Let’s just say that, uh, you know, the gun could have gone off.” A later Washington Post report described him as having admitted to being the “triggerman” shortly before his execution.⁷⁸

Inside the Death Chamber, December 7, 1982

Brooks was led into the chamber at the Walls Unit wearing gold pants, a light brown shirt open at the waist, and black cloth shoes. He was strapped to a hospital gurney with intravenous tubes in both arms. About two dozen witnesses watched from inside, while roughly 75 reporters gathered outside the prison, many of them criminal justice students from nearby Sam Houston State University.⁹

Fort Worth Muslim teacher Larry Amin Sharrieff, wearing a white prayer cap and carrying a red Quran and a prayer rug, led Brooks in prayer. Brooks chanted in Arabic: “I bear witness that there is no God but Allah. I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” Sharrieff answered: “May Allah admit you to paradise.”⁷

At 12:09 a.m., Warden Jack Pursley directed the injection to begin. The three drugs — sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride — flowed into Brooks’s veins in sequence. Witnesses saw him yawn, his eyes close, then a brief series of gasps, wheezes, and involuntary abdominal movements. He appeared to try to say “Allahu Akbar” but did not finish. At 12:16 a.m., Dr. Ralph Gray, assistant medical director for the Texas Department of Corrections, pronounced him dead.¹⁰¹¹

What those movements meant was disputed immediately. Reavis and Brooks had agreed on a signal: Brooks would shake his head side to side if he felt pain. Reavis reported seeing Brooks move his head slowly from left to right, which he took as a possible signal of pain. Walker County Sheriff Darrell White described the same event as “very peaceful.”⁷¹²

Where the Three-Drug Protocol Came From

The method used on Brooks had been invented five years earlier in Oklahoma, and not by anyone with experience designing executions. After the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in Gregg v. Georgia (1976), Oklahoma state legislator Bill Wiseman went looking for a more humane alternative to electrocution. He approached Dr. Jay Chapman, the state’s chief medical examiner. Sitting in Wiseman’s office, Chapman dictated the language for a new statute onto a yellow legal pad, calling for an intravenous barbiturate combined with a chemical paralytic.¹³

Chapman later added potassium chloride to stop the heart. Asked how he chose it, he said, “Why not?” He did no research on the specific combination and called potassium chloride’s lethality “just common knowledge” among doctors. He consulted an anesthesiologist, Dr. Stanley Deutsch, and a toxicologist about dosages, but the process was informal.¹³¹⁴

Oklahoma adopted lethal injection three months before Texas did in 1977. But Oklahoma did not carry out an execution first. Brooks’s death five years later was the first time the protocol was actually used anywhere in the country.¹⁵

What Brooks’s Execution Set in Motion

Since December 7, 1982, the federal government and U.S. states have executed more than 1,400 prisoners by lethal injection. Texas alone has carried out nearly 600 of them, far more than any other state.¹¹⁶

Proponents had promised a “swift and painless” alternative to hanging, electrocution, and the gas chamber. The disputes visible on the night Brooks died proved durable. Physician groups objected to the use of medical tools for executions. Drug shortages forced states to try alternative combinations, sometimes with grim results. Lawsuits challenged specific drugs, including midazolam, which critics say can cause a sensation of suffocation.¹⁷²

The Supreme Court has since taken up the method more than once. In Baze v. Rees (2008), the Court examined the three-drug protocol’s constitutionality for the first time. In Glossip v. Gross (2015), Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg called for a broader challenge to the death penalty. In Bucklew v. Precythe (2019), the Court rejected an as-applied challenge from a prisoner who argued a medical condition would make lethal injection torturous, with Justice Neil Gorsuch writing that capital punishment is referenced in the Bill of Rights and therefore cannot be considered categorically unconstitutional.¹⁸

Chapman, the man who sketched the protocol on a legal pad, later expressed ambivalence about the punishment he had helped enable. He called the death penalty “problematic,” citing prosecutorial misconduct and DNA exonerations.¹⁹ He also blamed botched executions on untrained personnel administering the drugs, and said a single massive overdose of sodium thiopental would have been sufficient and simpler than the three-drug sequence used on Charlie Brooks Jr.¹⁴

1
Texas Public Radio. The Death Penalty and the Untold Story of Lethal Injection
2
FW TX. The Unforgivable: Charlie Brooks
3
Clark Prosecutor. Charlie Brooks Jr.
4
UPI. A Vocational Nurse Who Exchanged Vows With Condemned Inmate
5
The Harvard Crimson. Painful Questions
6
Cornell Law Institute. Charlie Brooks Jr. v. W.J. Estelle Jr.
7
Texas Monthly. Charlie Brooks’ Last Words
8
Washington Post. Executed Man Reportedly Confessed Before Death
9
Washington Post. A Long Deep Yawn, He Was Gone
10
UPI. Charlie Brooks Jr. Looked the Witnesses to His Execution
11
Death Penalty Information Center. Charles Brooks
12
The Marshall Project. How Much Do You Know About the Death Penalty in the U.S.
13
Human Rights Watch. Lethal Injection Protocol
14
Time. Lethal Injection Creator Jay Chapman on Botched Executions
15
Death Penalty Information Center. Constitutionality of the Death Penalty in America
16
Death Penalty Information Center. Death Penalty in Texas
17
Smithsonian Magazine. The First Person Died by Lethal Injection: It Was Controversial Then, Too
18
Brennan Center for Justice. The Eighth Amendment, the Death Penalty, and the Supreme Court
19
Death Penalty Information Center. Creator of Lethal Injection Protocol Calls Death Penalty Problematic