Arizona executes Clarence Dixon

Arizona executes Clarence Dixon for 1978 murder of Deana Bowdoin

Arizona executed Clarence Dixon at the state prison in Florence on Wednesday for the 1978 murder of 21-year-old ASU student Deana Bowdoin.

Dixon was executed at 10:30 a.m., according to Deputy Corrections Director Frank Strada.

"I do and always will proclaim my innocence — now let's do this shit," Dixon said in his last statement, according to Strada.

Troy Hayden, a media witness from Fox News, said the execution team had trouble getting IVs into Dixon, who grimaced and appeared to be in pain while this was happening.

The officers took 25 minutes to put in the IVs, Hayden said. The execution team had to insert an IV into Dixon's groin.

He appeared to lose consciousness a few minutes after the drugs were injected, Hayden said.

Dixon was the 1st man put to death by Arizona since the botched execution of Joseph Wood in 2014.

Appeals for last-minute reprieve

Dixon's attorneys made several attempts to stop or postpone the execution, maintaining he was mentally incompetent to understand why he was being executed.

But multiple courts found that while Dixon may have harbored delusions about a judicial conspiracy to kill him, he was aware of his circumstances and constitutionally eligible to be put to death.

RELATED | Arizona Plans to Execute a Blind, Disabled Man Previously Found Legally Insane

Legal challenges from Dixon's attorneys claiming the lethal injection drugs the state planned to use were expired prompted the Department of Corrections to order the creation of a new batch of compounded pentobarbital just two days before his execution.

The Arizona Board of Executive Clemency denied requests from Dixon's attorneys for a commutation or reprieve. His attorneys asked for mercy, saying Dixon was blind, frail and in poor health and didn't represent a danger to society or anyone in the prison system. But the board denied the requests, saying Dixon had failed to show any remorse for his crimes.

The 1st execution since 2014

Arizona has not carried out an execution since the botched execution of Wood, which took nearly 2 hours to complete.

The state claims it has refined its execution protocols and is planning to use a single drug, pentobarbital, for executions, instead of the combination of drugs that were used on Wood. 

Pentobarbital was used successfully by the federal government in a series of executions conducted in 2020.

Dixon’s execution marks a return to the death penalty for Arizona after a troubled history that includes the state attempting to acquire execution drugs illegally in 2015 and more recently failing to accurately determine the shelf life of the pentobarbital the state plans to use moving forward.

Because the crimes Dixon was convicted of occurred before 1992, he had the choice between death by lethal injection or the gas chamber.

The state's last gas chamber execution was Walter LaGrand in 1999, documented by witnesses as lasting 18 minutes and characterized as agonizing. LaGrand was a German national convicted in 1984 for his role in the death of Kenneth Hartsock.

Background on Deana Bowdoin

Deana Bowdoin grew up in the Valley and graduated with honors from Camelback High School.

She studied abroad while at Arizona State University and was considering a career in law, international marketing or diplomacy after taking the LSAT and the Foreign Service Officers tests.

But in the early morning on Jan. 7, 1978, she was found dead inside her apartment. Her murder remained unsolved for more than 20 years.

In 2001, DNA technology connected Clarence Dixon to Bowdoin's murder. He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment hearing in January 2003, but was ultimately convicted a few years later.

Arizona's death row

According to the Arizona Attorney General's Office, there are more than 20 people on death row who have exhausted their appeals.

Frank Atwood, sentenced in Pima County in 1987 for the murder of an 8-year-old girl, Vicki Lynne Hoskinson, is scheduled to be executed June 8.

Dixon becomes the 1st condemned inmate to be put to death this year in Arizona and the 38th overall since Arizona resumed capital punishment in 1992.

Dixon becomes the 6th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1,546th overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977.

Sources: Arizona Republic, Staff; Rick Halperin, May 11, 2022

Arizona puts inmate Clarence Dixon to death in state's first execution in 8 years

His lawyers failed to convince the courts that the 66-year-old was mentally unfit to be executed for the killing of college student Deana Bowdoin in 1978.

An Arizona man convicted in the slaying of a college student more than 40 years ago was put to death Wednesday in the state's 1st execution since 2014.

A bid to spare the life of Clarence Dixon, 66, failed in the courts as his defense lawyers argued that it would be unconstitutional to kill Dixon because he was mentally unfit and unable to understand. His lawyers said Dixon had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, suffered from hallucinations and was blind and in frail health.

But a federal judge in Phoenix on Tuesday sided with a state court's conclusion that Dixon was competent, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied a last-minute request to halt his execution.

Dixon died by lethal injection at the state prison in Florence, the Arizona Department of Corrections confirmed.

In his last statement, Dixon condemned the Arizona Supreme Court for denying his appeals, said he would always proclaim his innocence and addressed the victim in his case, Deana Bowdoin.

"Maybe I'll see you on the other side Deana. I don't know you and I don't remember you," Dixon said in his final words, according to a media representative.

It took 11 minutes for the drugs to be administered, and he was pronounced dead at 10:30 a.m. local time. Another media representative said he had made a gasp upon the drugs being injected, but did not move otherwise.

In the days before Dixon's death, the method of lethal injection was questioned by his lawyers, who said that a batch of the sedative sodium pentobarbital mixed in February had expired and that its use would violate Arizona's execution rules.

State attorneys denied that the drug had gone bad, but offered to mix up a new batch and have it tested for potency.

Arizona halted its use of capital punishment in 2014 after the execution of Joseph Wood drew scrutiny when officials and witnesses said it took two hours for him to die, and he gasped and snorted for much of that period.

Source: NBC News, Staff, May 11, 2022

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde