Arizona set to execute 1st prisoner in nearly 8 years

FLORENCE, Ariz. (AP) — An Arizona man convicted of killing a college student in 1978 was scheduled Wednesday to become the first person to be executed in the state after a nearly eight-year hiatus in its use of the death penalty after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a last-minute appeal by the prisoner to halt it.

Clarence Dixon, 66, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at the state prison in Florence for his murder conviction in the killing of 21-year-old Arizona State University student Deana Bowdoin. If the execution goes ahead as planned, he will be the sixth inmate to be put to death in the United States this year.

In recent weeks, Dixon’s lawyers made arguments to the courts to postpone his execution, but judges had so far rejected his argument that he is mentally unfit to be executed and had no rational understanding of why the state wanted to put him to death.

Dixon’s lawyers had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review lower-court decisions that denied his request to postpone the execution but the court declined to hear the case in an announcement issued less than an hour before the execution scheduled for 10 a.m.

Dixon declined the option of being executed by the gas chamber — a method that hasn’t been used in the United States in more than two decades — after Arizona refurbished its gas chamber in late 2020. Instead, the state plans to executed him with an injection of pentobarbital.

The state’s hiatus in executions was driven by an execution that critics say was botched and the difficulty of finding lethal injection drugs.

The last time Arizona used the death penalty was in July 2014, when Joseph Wood was given 15 doses of a two-drug combination over two hours. Wood gasped more than 600 times before he died.

States including Arizona had struggled to buy...