Arizona executes Samuel Lopez

Samuel Lopez

A convicted murderer who challenged the fairness of Arizona's clemency board and won a temporary reprieve was executed on Wednesday for raping, beating and stabbing a woman to death in 1986.

Samuel Villegas Lopez, 49, was pronounced dead at 10:37 a.m. local time at the state prison complex in Florence, about 60 miles southeast of Phoenix, state officials said.

His execution was the first in which witnesses watched, via closed-circuit TV, the insertion of the catheters that deliver the fatal drug pentobarbital.

Attorneys for inmates in prior executions condemned the practice of inserting catheters into the prisoners' groins. Officials said the executioners had found it difficult to find suitable veins in the arms and legs.

In earlier executions, witnesses only saw the prisoner after the catheters had been inserted. Lopez was sentenced to death in 1987 for raping 59-year-old Estafana Holmes and stabbing her to death in a violent, drawn-out assault at her Phoenix apartment.

The U.S. Supreme Court turned down his last appeal on Tuesday, paving the way of the execution. He also lost a number of last-minute efforts to avoid the death penalty, including a request with the state Supreme Court to delay his execution until Arizona has a new governor. He claimed that Gov. Jan Brewer and the state's clemency board were prejudiced against him.

Brewer denied his lawyer's allegations that she placed "political cronies" on the board who'll never recommend lessening a death-row inmate's sentence to life in prison.

In denying him clemency, the board members called him "the worst of the worst."

Defense attorney Kelley Henry didn't dispute Lopez's guilt, but focused on the fact that trial attorneys failed to present any evidence that Lopez had a horrific childhood -- a mitigating factor that could have gotten him a sentence of life in prison.

A neuropsychiatrist testified that Lopez's childhood was filled with poverty, neglect, abuse and periods of homelessness during which he often had to sleep in cemeteries. Lopez dropped out of school in the ninth grade and became addicted to sniffing paint.

In an affidavit provided to the board, Lopez wrote that he has no memory of the crime because he had been spending so much time sniffing paint that he would forget entire days.

Lopez becomes the 4th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in Arizona and the 32nd overall since the state resumed capital punishment in 1992.

Lopez becomes the 23rd condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1300th overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977.

Sources: Reuters, Rick Halperin, June 27, 2012

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