Death row inmate Jamaal Howard has been executed in Texas.Howard has become the 30th person to be executed in the US this year, and the first since Christa Pike’s failed attempt in Tennessee.Howard, 46, was pronounced dead at 8.03pm local time after receiving a fatal dose of pentobarbital at the state prison in Huntsville.He was sentenced to death for the 2000 murder of Vickie Swartout during an attempted robbery.Howard was said to be ‘chatty’ during the 45-minute journey from death row to the Huntsville Unit where executions are carried out.Amanda Hernandez, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said: “He made small talk with the officers through the whole trip.”

Once inside, he was taken to a holding cell inside the death chamber, with Hernandez saying: “He was asking questions and was very engaged in the process.”Earlier today, his legal team had unsuccessfully tried to block the execution, claiming that Howard was intellectually disabled and raising concerns about the use of pentobarbital – the same drug that had been used in Pike’s execution attempt on 30 September.A One filing from his team read: “Ms. Pike survived two lethal doses of pentobarbital, the same drug used in executions in Texas, and she reportedly remains hospitalised in critical condition.“When an execution goes wrong, one of the first questions anyone asks is whether the drug was what the State said it was.“Tennessee’s own officials cannot yet answer that, and the answer lies in records: when the drug was bought, from whom, how it was stored, and what testing was done and when. Texas should not wait until after a failed execution to ask the same questions.