10/28/2023 0 Comments Houdini death row alabama![]() “I have never known for certain whether my father killed Troy Wicker,” she said in a statement after the execution. She later changed her story, testifying that she paid Arthur $10,000 to kill her husband and that he painted his face black and wore a wig when he committed the crime.Īfter expressing sympathy for Wicker's family, Sherrie Stone, 55, the eldest of Arthur’s four children, called for mandatory DNA testing of available evidence in all capital cases across the United States. The state said that after embarking on an affair with the victim’s wife, Judy Wicker, he shot her husband in the right eye with a pistol.Īfter the crime, Wicker told police she was raped by a black man who knocked her unconscious and shot her husband. Arthur was rightfully convicted and sentenced, and tonight that sentence was rightfully and justly carried out,” she said.Ĭonvicted in the 1982 murder of Troy Wicker, Arthur had long maintained his innocence. Kay Ivey said the decision on whether to spare Arthur’s life was one of the most difficult she had ever made, and that she ultimately decided to allow the decision of the jury to stand. In that time, 58 other Alabama inmates have been executed. “When Thomas Arthur enters the execution chamber tonight, he will leave his constitutional rights at the door,” she wrote.Īrthur, who was first sentenced to death in 1983 when George Wallace was governor of Alabama, has spent more than 34 years on death row. Alabama officials, she argued, had only compounded the risks by denying Arthur’s attorneys access to a phone in the witness room to contact the courts if any aspect of the execution went wrong. In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized the court’s decision, arguing that she continued to doubt that one of the state’s execution drugs, midazolam, was capable of rendering prisoners unable to feel the “excruciating pain” of lethal injection. The nation’s highest court then went on to lift the stay an hour and 15 minutes before Arthur’s death warrant expired at midnight. Supreme Court issued a temporary stay, signed by Justice Clarence Thomas. “I love you more than anything on Earth.”Īrthur had initially been scheduled to be executed at 6 p.m., but the U.S. “I’m sorry for failing you as a father,” he said. With his final words, Arthur apologized to his children. ![]() About half an hour later, he was pronounced dead. After narrowly dodging execution seven times, an Alabama inmate dubbed the “Houdini of death row” was put to death Thursday.Ĭonvicted murderer Thomas Arthur, 75, was strapped to a gurney at the Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Ala., and injected with a cocktail of lethal drugs about 11:45 p.m.
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