FLORENCE, Ariz. –
An Arizona man convicted of killing a college student in 1978 was executed Wednesday after a nearly eight-year hiatus in the state’s use of the death penalty sparked by an execution critics say was botched. and the difficulty state officials faced in finding lethal injection drugs.
Clarence Dixon, 66, died by lethal injection at Florence State Prison for his murder conviction in the slaying of 21-year-old Arizona State University student Deana Bowdoin, making him the sixth person to be executed. in the US in 2022. Dixon’s death was announced Wednesday morning by Frank Strada, deputy director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry.
Dixon’s death appeared to go smoothly, said Troy Hayden, a Fox10 TV news show host who witnessed the execution.
“Once the drugs started flowing, he fell asleep almost immediately,” Hayden said.
In the last weeks of his life, Dixon’s lawyers made last-minute arguments in court to postpone his execution, but the judges rejected their argument that he is mentally unfit to be executed and had no rational understanding of why the state wanted to run it. The United States Supreme Court rejected a last-minute delay in Dixon’s execution less than an hour before his execution was to begin.
Dixon had turned down the option of being killed in the gas chamber, a method that has not been used in the US in more than two decades, after Arizona renovated its gas chamber in late 2020. Instead, he was executed with an injection. of pentobarbital.
Strada said that Dixon’s last statement was: “The Arizona Supreme Court must follow the law. They denied my appeals and petitions to change the outcome of this trial. I proclaim and always will proclaim my innocence. Now, let’s do this (expletive).”
The last time Arizona executed a prisoner was in July 2014, when Joseph Wood was given 15 doses of a two-drug combination over two hours in an execution his lawyers say was botched. Wood repeatedly snorted and gasped more than 600 times before he died.
States, including Arizona, have struggled to buy execution drugs in recent years after US and European drug companies began blocking the use of their products in lethal injections.
Authorities have said Bowdoin, who was found dead in her apartment in Tempe, a Phoenix suburb, had been raped, stabbed and strangled with a belt.
Dixon, who was an ASU student at the time and lived across the street from Bowdoin, had been charged with raping Bowdoin, but the rape charge was later dropped on statute of limitations. He was found guilty of murder in the murder of him.
Arguing that Dixon was mentally ill, his lawyers said he mistakenly believed he would be executed because Northern Arizona University police wrongfully arrested him in another case: a 1985 attack on a 21-year-old student. His attorneys admitted that he was lawfully arrested by the Flagstaff police.
Dixon was sentenced to life in prison in that case for sexual assault and other convictions. DNA samples taken while in prison later linked him to the Bowdoin murder, which had gone unsolved.
Prosecutors said there was nothing in Dixon’s beliefs that prevented him from understanding the reason for the execution, and pointed to court appearances Dixon himself made over the years.
Defense attorneys said Dixon was repeatedly diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, regularly experienced hallucinations for the past 30 years and was found “not guilty by reason of insanity” in a 1977 assault case in which the verdict was handed down by then-Tribunal judge. Maricopa County Superior, Sandra. Day O’Connor, nearly four years before his appointment to the United States Supreme Court. Bowdoin was killed two days after that verdict, according to court records.
Another Arizona death row inmate, Frank Atwood, is scheduled to be executed June 8 for the 1984 murder of 8-year-old Vicki Lynne Hoskinson. Authorities have said Atwood kidnapped the girl.
The girl’s remains were discovered in the desert northwest of Tucson nearly seven months after she went missing. Experts were unable to determine a cause of death from the bones that were found, according to court records.
Arizona has 112 inmates on death row.
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Billeaud reported from Phoenix.
Reference-www.ctvnews.ca