Kentucky's first execution in 9 years

[pumpkinpie]

US state executes first inmate in 9 years
The Associated PressPublished: November 22, 2008

EDDYVILLE, Kentucky: Kentucky has executed a confessed child-killer who resisted all appeals.

In the state's first execution in nine years, 37-year-old Marco Allen Chapman was given a lethal injection Friday at the Kentucky State Penitentiary.

Chapman pleaded guilty in 2004 to killing two children in their northern Kentucky home in a 2002 attack that wounded their mother and another child.

He asked to be put to death and fought for the right to fire his attorneys to clear the way.

Kentucky's last execution was in 1999, when Eddie Lee Harper died by lethal injection.

www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/11/22/america/NA-US-Kentucky-Execution.php

[happyhaddock]

Who knows; without the DP he might never have killed. He certainly seems to have sought execution.

[happyhaddock]

It's not impossible. Some kill themselves, others let the state do it for them.

The first volunteer after the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 was Gary Mark Gilmore, put to death a year later by a firing squad in Utah for killing a gas station attendant. The 128 men and two women who have followed suit often gave similar reasons — mainly remorse, a desire for atonement and not wanting to spend their lives in prison — according to the Death Penalty Information Center, an anti-capital-punishment group that compiles statistics on executions.

About 12 percent of the 1,133 inmates executed in the United States since 1977 abandoned their appeals and asked for their sentences to be carried out, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the center and a law professor at Catholic University in Washington. Each time, the inmate either fired the defense lawyer or told them to stop filing appeals.

"It amounts to the same thing," Dieter said.