Arizona plans to execute 1st prisoner in nearly 8 years

PHOENIX – An Arizona man convicted of killing a university pupil in 1978 is scheduled to turn into the primary particular person to be executed within the state after an almost eight-year hiatus in its use of the demise penalty.

Clarence Dixon, 66, is scheduled to die by deadly injection Wednesday morning on the state jail in Florence for his homicide conviction within the killing of 21-year-old Arizona State College pupil Deana Bowdoin. If the execution goes forward as deliberate, he would be the sixth inmate to be put to demise in america this yr.

In latest weeks, Dixon’s attorneys have made arguments to the courts to postpone his execution, however judges had up to now rejected his argument that he’s mentally unfit to be executed and had no rational understanding of why the state needed to place him to demise.

Dixon declined the choice of being executed by the fuel chamber — a technique that hasn’t been utilized in america in additional than twenty years — after Arizona refurbished its fuel chamber in late 2020. As a substitute, the state plans to executed him with an injection of pentobarbital.

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The state’s hiatus in executions was pushed by an execution that critics say was botched and the issue of discovering deadly injection medicine.

The final time Arizona used the demise penalty was in July 2014, when Joseph Wooden was given 15 doses of a two-drug mixture over two hours. Wooden gasped greater than 600 instances earlier than he died.

States together with Arizona had struggled to purchase execution medicine lately after U.S. and European pharmaceutical firms started blocking using their merchandise in deadly injections.

Authorities have mentioned Bowdoin, who was discovered lifeless in her condominium in Tempe, had been raped, stabbed and strangled with a belt.

Dixon, who was an ASU pupil on the time and lived throughout the road from Bowdoin, had been charged with raping Bowdoin, however the cost was later dropped on statute-of-limitation grounds. He was convicted, although, in her demise.

In arguing their consumer was mentally unfit, Dixon’s attorneys have mentioned he erroneously believes he will probably be executed as a result of police at Northern Arizona College wrongfully arrested him in a earlier case — a 1985 assault on a 21-year-old pupil. His attorneys concede he was the truth is lawfully arrested then by Flagstaff police.

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Dixon was sentenced to life sentences in that case for sexual assault and different convictions. DNA samples taken whereas he was in jail later linked him to Bowdoin’s killing, which at that time had been unsolved.

Prosecutors mentioned there was nothing about Dixon’s beliefs that stops him from understanding the rationale for the execution and pointed to courtroom filings that Dixon himself made through the years.

Protection attorneys have mentioned Dixon has been identified with paranoid schizophrenia on a number of events, has frequently skilled hallucinations over the previous 30 years and was discovered not responsible by motive of madness in a 1977 assault case wherein the decision was delivered by then-Maricopa County Superior Courtroom Decide Sandra Day O’Connor, practically 4 years earlier than her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Courtroom. Bowdoin was killed two days after the decision, in keeping with courtroom data.

One other Arizona death-row prisoner, Frank Atwood, is scheduled to be executed June 8 within the killing of 8-year-old Vicki Lynne Hoskinson in 1984. Authorities say Atwood kidnapped the lady, whose physique was discovered within the desert northwest of Tucson.

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Arizona has 113 prisoners on demise row.