Clarence Dixon, 66, died by lethal injection at the state prison in Florence for his 1978 murder of Deana Bowdoin, a 21-year-old Arizona State University student.
The Associated Press FLORENCE — An Arizona man convicted of killing a college student in 1978 was put to death Wednesday after a nearly eight-year hiatus in the state’s use of the death penalty brought on by an execution that critics say was botched — and the difficulty state officials faced in finding lethal injection drugs.
People are also reading… Dixon had declined the option of being killed in the gas chamber — a method that hasn’t been used in the U.S. in more than two decades — after Arizona refurbished its gas chamber in late 2020. Instead, he was executed with an injection of pentobarbital. States including Arizona have struggled to buy execution drugs in recent years after U.S. and European pharmaceutical companies began blocking the use of their products in lethal injections.
In arguing that Dixon was mentally unfit, his lawyers said he erroneously believed he would be executed because police at Northern Arizona University wrongfully arrested him in another case — a 1985 attack on a 21-year-old student. His attorneys conceded he was lawfully arrested by Flagstaff police. Defense lawyers said Dixon was repeatedly diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, regularly experienced hallucinations over the past 30 years and was found “not guilty by reason of insanity” in a 1977 assault case in which the verdict was delivered by then-Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sandra Day O’Connor, nearly four years before her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Bowdoin was killed two days after that verdict, according to court records.
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