AFP, published on Wednesday, May 11, 2022 at 5:57 p.m.
A Native American sentenced to death in 2008 for the murder of a student 30 years earlier is to be executed on Wednesday in the southwestern US state of Arizona, which had not carried out an execution since 2014.
Clarence Dixon, a 66-year-old member of the Navajo Nation, is to receive a lethal injection in the execution chamber of Florence State Prison at 10 a.m. local time (1700 GMT).
His lawyers filed multiple appeals, arguing that their client, blind and suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, did not understand why he had been sentenced to death.
Mr. Dixon “lives in his head, he lives in parallel realities”, his lawyer Eric Zuckerman said on Tuesday during a hearing before a San Francisco appeals court which rejected his appeal.
A final request for a stay of execution was presented Tuesday morning before the Supreme Court of the United States.
In January 1978, he stabbed, strangled and raped a 21-year-old student, Deana Bowdoin, in Tempe, a few days after being found not guilty of an assault because of her psychological state.
Sentenced to life in prison for a sexual assault in 1986, he was mistaken thanks to DNA analyzes for the death of the student.
Arizona resumed executions by lethal injection after an 8-year hiatus, when an inmate had been in agony for two hours, seized with convulsions after the injection of 15 doses of lethal products.
Doubts about the legality of this protocol – suspected of causing illegal suffering to convicts – and the refusal of pharmaceutical companies to supply these products have led to a marked decline in the death penalty in the country.
The authorities of this conservative state – where 113 convicts including Clarence Dixon are waiting on death row – have also authorized executions by lethal gas in a gas chamber.
They planned to use hydrogen cyanide, the main element of Zyklon-B, gas associated with the Holocaust.
Clarence Dixon had had two weeks to request the gas chamber, in order to avoid the lethal injection. His silence was worth accepting the second option.
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