Michael Rodriguez member of the famed "Texas Seven" prison escapees who murdered Irving patrol Officer Aubrey Hawkins during a robbery on Christmas E

Michael Rodriguez, who was executed Thursday, earned his spot on death row.
He earned it twice, really, having earlier dodged the needle by plea bargaining for a life sentence to the 1992 contract murder of his trusting wife.
He sealed the deal, of course, as a member of the famed "Texas Seven" prison escapees who murdered Irving patrol Officer Aubrey Hawkins during a robbery on Christmas Eve 2000.
The robbers burst out of a sporting goods store just as the officer pulled up in his squad car. They shot him 11 times, pulled him out of his car and ran over him in the parking lot. Mr. Rodriguez, by his own account, reached into the dying officer's holster and stole the service weapon he hadn't had a chance to draw.
Judged by his actions, Michael Rodriguez was as selfish, vicious and amoral as any of his neighbors in the Huntsville death house.What set him apart was that he grasped the enormity of the evil he did.What switched on the bulb of self-awareness in this man's head toward the end of his life is anybody's guess. Religion? Maybe – but earnest, self-avowed converts are a dime a dozen in prison. Remorse? Perhaps. Or maybe just a tired wonder at the botched wreckage he made of his own life in the process of ruining so many others.
"I sit in my cell and think: How the heck did I get here?" he told veteran Associated Press reporter Michael Graczyk during the single, extraordinarily candid interview he gave before his execution. "I'm guilty of what they said – everything."
Everything: How, as a successful San Antonio restaurant owner, he paid a crackhead $2,000 to shoot his wife in the head as he stood and watched – because he was hot for a younger woman he had met, and because he wanted a big insurance payoff.
How he bought into "Texas Seven" ringleader George Rivas' tough-guy stories in prison and signed onto the breakout plan. How he helped kill Aubrey Hawkins. How he hid out with the gang until they were arrested in Colorado.
Even how he went along with an accusation of sexual abuse against a Catholic lay brother who taught him in high school – a completely fabricated tale, he told Mr. Graczyk, to try to curry sympathy with jurors at his capital murder trial.
I don't feel sorry for Michael Rodriguez – I could never look a police officer in the face again if I did – but I believe his contrition was genuine. At some point, the greed and violence and chaos in his head gave way to a deep clarity.
His sad resignation, his willingness to drop appeals, his apparent belief that all he could offer his victims was to accept his punishment without protest, all point to that rarest of criminal commodities – remorse.
Some people, inevitably, will call it fake, will claim that no one who did the things Michael Rodriguez did could experience genuine regret.But isn't remorse what we want from the criminals in our society?
Consider Leon Dorsey, the so-called Blockbuster killer who preceded Mr. Rodriguez to the death chamber: In his final weeks, he remained full of gangster bravado, threatening guards and blaming the people he killed for their own deaths. "Remorse" was beyond Leon Dorsey's emotional range.I have to wonder whether Mr. Rodriguez's remorse was a blessing or a curse. Did he embrace the enlightenment that allowed him to understand the pointless destruction he caused? Was it a kind of penitential grace?
Or was that knowledge too painful, too stark in its ugliness to endure?
If there's an answer, Michael Rodriguez took it to his grave.