Florence, Arizona (AP) – An Arizona man convicted of killing a student in 1978 was killed Wednesday after a nearly eight-year hiatus in the use of the death penalty by the state caused by an execution that critics say failed – and the difficulties faced by government officials in finding lethal injecting drugs.
Clarence Dixon, 66, died of a fatal injection in Florence State Prison for her murder conviction in the murder of 21-year-old Arizona State University student Diana Bowdoin, making him the sixth person executed in the United States in 2022. Dixon’s death was announced late Wednesday morning by Frank Strada, deputy director of the Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Re-entry in Arizona.
Dixon’s death appears to have gone smoothly, said Troy Hayden, host of the Fox10 news program 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 argued in court at the last minute to postpone his execution, but judges rejected his argument that he was not mentally fit to be executed and had no rational understanding of why the state wanted to execute him. The US Supreme Court has rejected the postponement of Dixon’s execution at the last minute less than an hour before his execution began.
Dixon ruled out being killed in the gas chamber – a method not used in the United States for more than two decades – after Arizona renewed its gas chamber in late 2020. Instead, he was executed with a pentobarbital injection.
Strada said Dixon’s latest statement was: “Arizona’s Supreme Court must obey the law. They rejected my complaints and requests to change the outcome of this process. I do and will always declare innocence. Now, let’s do this (curse).
The last time Arizona executed a prisoner was in July 2014, when Joseph Wood was given 15 doses of a combination of two drugs for two hours in execution, which his lawyers told him had failed. Wood snorted repeatedly and gasped more than 600 times before dying.
States, including Arizona, have struggled to buy executions in recent years after U.S. and European pharmaceutical companies began blocking the use of their products for lethal injections.
Authorities say Bowdoin, who was found dead in her apartment in the Tempe suburb of Phoenix, was raped, stabbed and strangled.
Dixon, who was an ASU student at the time and lived across the street from Bowdoin, was charged with raping Bowdoin, but the rape charge was later dropped on statute of limitations. He was convicted of murder in her murder.
Claiming that Dixon was mentally ill, his lawyers said he mistakenly believed he would be executed because police at the University of Northern Arizona wrongfully arrested him in another case, a 1985 attack on a 21-year-old student. His lawyers admitted that he had been legally arrested by Flagstaff police.
In this case, Dixon was sentenced to life in prison for sexual assault and other sentences. DNA samples taken while he was in prison later linked him to Bowdoin’s murder, which has not been revealed.
Prosecutors said there was nothing in Dixon’s convictions to prevent him from understanding the reason for the execution, citing court documents Dixon himself had made over the years.
Defense attorneys said Dixon had been repeatedly diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, had experienced hallucinations regularly for the past 30 years and was found “not guilty of insanity” in a 1977 assault case handed down by a judge at the time. by the Maricopa Sandra County Supreme Court. Day O’Connor, nearly four years before her appointment to the United States Supreme Court. According to court records, Bowdoin was killed two days after the verdict.
Another Arizona inmate sentenced to death, Frank Atwood, is scheduled to be executed on June 8 in the 1984 murder of 8-year-old Vicki Lynn Hoskinson. Authorities say Atwood abducted the girl.
The remains of the child were found in the desert northwest of Tucson nearly seven months after her disappearance. Experts could not determine the cause of death from the bones found, according to court records.
Arizona has 112 prisoners sentenced to death.
___
It was reported by Phoenix.
Add Comment