US state of Arizona executes first death row inmate since 2014

Clarence Dixon, a 66-year-old member of the Navajo Nation, was pronounced dead at 10:30 a.m. local time (7:30 p.m. Brussels time) following receiving a lethal injection at Florence State Prison, prison services said in a statement. from Arizona.

In January 1978, he stabbed, strangled and raped a 21-year-old student, Deana Bowdoin, in Tempe, days following being found not guilty of an assault due to 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.

“I might see you on the other side Deana. I don’t know you and I don’t remember you,” he said before the sentence was carried out, according to a witness quoted by the local press. .

His lawyers had 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.

The Supreme Court of the United States on Wednesday rejected a final request for a stay filed a few hours before the execution.

Arizona resumed executions by lethal injection following an 8-year hiatus, when an inmate had been in agony for two hours, seized with convulsions following the injection of 15 doses of lethal products. (

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