Death Penalty News

PHOENIX (AP) — An Arizona prisoner convicted in the 1984 killing of an 8-year-old girl is scheduled to be executed Wednesday in what would be the state’s second execution since officials started carrying out the death penalty in May after a nearly eight-year hiatus. Frank Atwood, 66, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at the state prison in Florence for his murder conviction in the killing of Vicki Hoskinson, whose body was found in the desert. She went missing months earlier after leaving her home in Tucson to drop a birthday card in a nearby mailbox. If the execution isn’t halted by court action, Atwood will be the second Arizona prisoner to be put to death in less than a month. The execution of Clarence Dixon last month ended Arizona’s halt to executions that was blamed on the difficulty of obtaining lethal injection drugs and criticism that a 2014 execution in the state was botched. Death penalty opponents worry that Arizona will now start executing a steady stream of prisoner...

Death row prisoner Frank Atwood is requesting the state execute him in the gas chamber, but with nitrogen gas, as opposed to the cyanide specified in the Arizona Department of Corrections protocols. Atwood is scheduled to be executed on June 8. He was sentenced to death in Pima County in 1987 for the murder of an 8-year-old girl, Vicki Lynne Hoskinson. Because Atwood’s crimes occurred before the gas chamber was outlawed in Arizona in 1992, he has a choice between death by lethal gas or lethal injection. On background: Who is Frank Atwood? What to know about Arizona's next scheduled execution State law requires that Atwood choose a method of execution 20 days prior to the execution, which leaves Atwood’s deadline to choose as 12:01 a.m. on May 20. If Atwood does not make a choice, then the default method to be used by the state is lethal injection. Atwood’s attorneys have argued both methods would lead to a “torturous” amount of pain, and therefore neither are constitutional. They ...

PHOENIX - Reports that Arizona has restored its gas chamber is sparking new debate about executions. The chamber is housed at the state prison in Florence, and hasn’t been used in more than two decades, But that could change in the coming months. On June 10, the Associated Press reported that the state has purchased materials to make hydrogen cyanide gas, which was used in some past U.S. executions and which the Nazis used to kill 865,000 Jews at the Auschwitz concentration camp alone. Gas chamber last used in 1999 According to the Associated Press, Walter LaGrand, the second of two German brothers sentenced to death for killing a bank manager in Southern Arizona in 1982, was the last person in America to be put to death in a gas chamber. Witness reportedly said it took more than 10 minutes of gasping and convulsing before LaGrand died. According to the Associated Press, Walter and his brother, Karl, both chose the gas chamber in hopes that courts would find the method unconstitutional...

The corrections department has spent more than $2,000 on ingredients to make cyanide gas, the same used in Auschwitz The state of Arizona is preparing to kill death row inmates using hydrogen cyanide, the same lethal gas that was deployed at Auschwitz. Documents obtained by the Guardian reveal that Arizona’s department of corrections has spent more than $2,000 in procuring the ingredients to make cyanide gas. The department bought a solid brick of potassium cyanide in December for $1,530. It also purchased sodium hydroxide pellets and sulfuric acid which are intended to be used to generate the deadly gas. The gas chamber itself, built in 1949 and disused for 22 years, has been dusted off and, according to the department, “refurbished”. Over the past few months the Republican-controlled state has moved aggressively to restart its deeply flawed execution system. The death penalty has been in abeyance in Arizona for seven years following the gruesomely botched lethal injection of Joseph ...