An activist against the death penalty protests the execution of Clarence Dixon.Rick Scuteri (AP)
Arizona has executed the first prisoner since 2014 on Wednesday morning. Authorities from the State Department of Corrections reported that they supplied Clarence Dixon, 66, with the deadly cocktail of drugs at 10:30 in the morning.
The prisoner had been convicted of the rape of a woman and the murder of a university student in 1978. "I have always proclaimed my innocence and I will continue to do so... Now let's get this shit over with," were the last words of the inmate, who he received the torrent of deadly drugs through a tube in his groin.
This is the first execution in almost eight years in the state.
In 2014, Arizona was forced to suspend lethal injections after the Joseph Wood fiasco.
The inmate lay on the stretcher, gasping and swallowing for endless minutes.
The authorities must have used 750 milligrams of midazolam and hydromorphone in him, an amount 15 times greater than the normal dose of the deadly cocktail.
Wood took almost two hours to die.
It was the third troublesome execution in the United States that year.
Dixon, a Navajo Indian, passed out just minutes after receiving the lethal injection.
According to the local press, he avoided any eye contact with those present.
A reporter who witnessed the execution described the prisoner letting out a long breath and then appearing to fall asleep.
The deceased grew up on one of the ethnic reservations in the southwestern United States.
His lawyers assured that his childhood was full of abuse and health problems.
His father grew up in one of the controversial boarding schools created by US governments to strip Indians of their culture and adapt them to American life.
His relationship with his children and his wife was marked by substance abuse and aggression.
Dixon, in turn, grew up with various addiction and mental health issues.
He entered the university in 1976, but his career as a student soon derailed.
Shortly after, two psychiatrists diagnosed him with schizophrenia in a judicial process initiated after the subject hit a woman on the head with a pipe.
Deana Lynne Bowdoin, 21, was found dead in her apartment in January 1978, in the city of Tempe.
Her body, found by her boyfriend at two in the morning, had a belt around her neck and teeth marks on her right wrist.
The young woman was studying Marketing at the University of Arizona.
Her murder rocked the college community, but she soon joined a long list of cold cases after detectives removed her boyfriend from the list of suspects.
Clarence Dixon, a Navajo Indian, in a photograph from the Arizona Department of Corrections. HANDOUT (AFP)
It took more than 20 years to connect the Bowdoin case with Dixon.
In 2001, the phone rang at the Tempe Police Department, part of the Phoenix metropolitan area.
A lab analysis found Dixon's DNA in evidence collected at the crime scene two decades earlier.
Technological advances and the creation of a database with genetic information from prisoners could finally solve a homicide that many in Arizona believed would go unpunished.
The lab had Dixon's DNA on file because he had raped a 20-year-old woman in 1985. The man received seven life sentences a year later for the crime.
In January 2003, Dixon pleaded not guilty at Bowdoin's murder trial.
A quarter of a century had passed since the young woman's death.
A Pew Center poll from last year reveals that the death penalty is supported by 60% among Americans for those criminals who have been convicted of a homicide.
In the country, 27 states (out of 50) continue to use capital punishment, in addition to the federal government.
The number of executions, however, has been on the decline.
Thirteen of the entities that still have it in force have not murdered a prisoner in a decade or more.
Until the end of 2019, more than 2,500 inmates were waiting on death row.
98% of these are men.
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