Florence, Arizona –
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 over an execution that critics say failed – and the difficulties facing the state. employees in the procurement of lethal injectable 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.
After the drug injection, Dixon’s mouth remained open and his body did not move, Hayden and other witnesses said. The execution was announced to be completed about 10 minutes after his injection.
Hayden said Dixon said his last words after the injection, saying, “Maybe I’ll see you on the other side, Diana. I don’t know you and I don’t remember. “
In the last weeks of Dixon’s life, his lawyers tried to postpone his execution, but judges rejected the argument that he was not mentally fit to be executed and has no rational understanding of why the state wants to execute him. The US Supreme Court has rejected the postponement of Dixon’s execution at the last minute less than an hour before the execution began.
Earlier, Dixon ruled out the possibility of being killed in an Arizona gas chamber that was renovated in 2020, a method that has not been used in the United States for more than two decades.
Shortly before he was executed with pentobarbital, Strada said Dixon said, “Arizona’s Supreme Court must obey the law. They rejected my complaints and petitions to change the outcome of this process. I do and will always declare innocence. Now, let’s do that (curse). “
And as prison medical staff put an intravenous line in Dixon’s thigh in preparation for the injection, he rebuked them, saying, “That’s really funny – trying to be as thorough as possible while trying to kill me.”
Leslie James, Bowdoin’s older sister and witness to the execution, told reporters after the event that Diana Bowdoin was ready to graduate from ASU and was planning a career in international marketing. James described his sister as a hard worker who loved to travel, spoke many languages and wrote poetry.
She described the execution as a relief, but criticized how long it had taken: “This process was very, very, too long,” James said. He was sentenced to death by his sentence in 2008.
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 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.
Saying Dixon was mentally ill, his lawyers said he mistakenly believed he would be executed because police at the University of Northern Arizona at Flagstaff 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 now has 112 inmates sentenced to death in the state.
——
It was reported by Phoenix. Associated Press writer Bob Christie of Phoenix contributed to this report.
Add Comment