Arizona execution on track after court challenges fail

Clarence Dixon still set to be executed Wednesday morning

(KYMA, KECY/ AP News) - The planned execution in Arizona remains on track after two last-minute court efforts ended without decisions that would sidetrack the state from putting 66-year-old Clarence Dixon to death.

Early on Monday, the state Supreme Court declined to overturn a lower court ruling that found Dixon is competent to be put to death.

And later in the day, Dixon’s lawyers dropped a challenge in federal court to the drug the state planned to use after agreeing that a new batch mixed by a pharmacist negated their argument that the drugs had expired.

Dixon is set to be executed at the state prison in Florence on Wednesday morning, a move that will be the first execution in the state in nearly eight years.

Dixon was serving life sentences for a 1985 attack on a 21-year-old Northern Arizona University student when DNA testing linked him to 21-year-old Arizona State University student Deana Bowdoin’s unsolved rape and murder.