Lawyers for Arizona prisoner on death row say he’s mentally unfit to be executed
(KYMA, KECY/ AP NEWS) - Attorneys for the prisoner scheduled to become the first person to be executed in Arizona in nearly eight years are making another bid to try to stop his execution.
In an order, a Pinal County judge concluded defense lawyers had shown reasonable grounds for appointing mental health experts to examine clarence dixon and for planning a hearing over whether their client is competent to be executed.
Dixon is on death row for an execution set for May 11 for his murder conviction in the 1977 killing of Deana Bowdoin, a 21-year-old Arizona State University student.
Dixon’s attorneys say putting Dixon to death would violate protections against executing people who are mentally incompetent.
They say Dixon has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia on multiple occasions, and has regularly experienced hallucinations over the past 30 years.
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 in an execution that his lawyers said was botched.
Dixon must decide whether to be injected with a lethal drug or by the gas chamber. If he doesn’t make a choice, lethal injection will serve as the default execution method.
The nation’s last lethal-gas execution was carried out in Arizona more than two decades ago, before the United States rejected the brutal nature of the deaths. The state refurbished its gas chamber in late 2020. Corrections officials have declined to say why they are restarting the gas chamber.
