AUSTIN (AP) - Texas death row inmate Gene Wilford Hathorn Junior could get another chance to avoid execution.

The Court of Criminal Appeals will reconsider whether jurors were properly instructed on considering potential mitigating evidence that he was abused as child.

Hathorn and a co-worker at Rusk State Hospital, James Beathard, were sentenced to die for a 1984 rampage that killed Hathorn's father, stepmother and half-brother in Trinity County.

Beathard was executed in 1999.

Court records indicated Hathorn supplied Beathard with illegal drugs for him to sell.

They also show that Hathorn talked of his desire to kill Gene Hathorn Senior, Linda Hathorn and 14-year-old Marcus Hathorn -- to collect an inheritance.

Appeals attorney David Sergi says the elder Hathorn regularly abused his son, what the lawyer calls: "beatings, emotional abuse ... good old country whippings."