HUNTSVILLE, Texas - Convicted killer Ronald Ray Howard was executed Thursday for fatally shooting a Texas state trooper, a slaying his trial attorneys argued was prompted by Howard listening to anti-police rap music.

Asked if he had a final statement, Howard looked at the trooper's widow, daughter and brother and said he hoped "this helps a little. I don't know how, but I hope it helps."

As the drugs were administered, he lifted his head from the gurney and mouthed that he loved them, urged them to be strong and said "I'm going home."

The execution was the 14th this year in Texas, the nation's most active capital punishment state. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles earlier this week unanimously refused Howard's request that his death sentence be commuted to life.

Davidson, father of two and on the force for 19 years, died three days later of a gunshot wound to the neck. Howard was captured within hours of the slaying after a police chase that ended in nearby Victoria when he wrecked the stolen SUV he was driving, crashing it into a house, and tried to run away on foot.

Howard said the trooper earlier had pulled along side of him, sped off, then was waiting over a hill on the side of the road as Howard drove past, flicked on his lights and pulled him over.

"I felt like I was being taunted," Howard said, adding that his previous encounters with police, particularly in his hometown of Houston, soured him on police officers.

"All my experiences with police have never been good, whether I've been doing something bad or not. That's what I think played a major part. I assumed that this wasn't going to be a good experience either."

Defense lawyers argued at his trial that Howard's constant exposure to gangsta rap music and its anti-police messages influenced him to pull the trigger.

"He grew up in the ghetto and disliked police and these were his heroes, these rappers ... telling him if you're pulled over, just blast away," his trial attorney, Allen Tanner, recalled last week. "It affected him. That was a totally valid serious defense."

Howard told a grand jury he was listening to "Soulja's Story" by Tupac Shakur before he shot Davidson. The song makes references to a young black male being pulled over by police, remembering Rodney King, then opening fire on an officer.

"I'm not a psychologist," Howard said Wednesday. "So I don't know. I never said: Yes it did or no it didn't. I don't know. But my lawyers thought it could have caused it. And they were trying to justify, put reason, for what I did."

At the time of the April 1992 shooting, the 18-year-old father of four was on probation for burglary. He acknowledged Wednesday stealing "a lot of cars" but said it was the normal activity for kids in his part of Houston.

"When you think about people on death row, you think of monsters, non-sociable people who can't help but hurt other people. That's not who I am," he said.

Jurors in Austin, where Howard's trial was moved because of publicity in Jackson County, needed just 40 minutes to convict the self-admitted drug dealer and seventh-grade dropout. The same panel, however, deliberated six days before deciding he should die.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Howard's death sentence in 1996 because a potential juror improperly was eliminated from the jury pool. At a second trial in Corpus Christi in 1999, Howard again was sentenced to die.

In last-day appeals, David Dow, with the Texas Innocence Project, argued in the federal courts Howard was abandoned by a previous court-appointed attorney who failed to file proper appeals.

Dow was appointed to the case within the past few days and argued without a reprieve, there wasn't enough time for his team to write a petition seeking review of the case.

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