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Frank Atwood: Been on death row for decades
Photo: Arizona Department of Corrections;
Rehabilitation and Reentry / AP
A 66-year-old man convicted of murder has been executed in Arizona.
Frank Atwood was killed by lethal injection at a prison in the city of Florence at 10:16 a.m. Wednesday, prosecutor Mark Brnovich said.
Atwood was convicted in 1987 of the 1984 murder of an eight-year-old girl.
The girl's body was discovered in a desert.
In the last few weeks of Atwood's life, his lawyers had tried unsuccessfully to come up with new arguments to overturn the death sentence.
Among other things, they stated that they had discovered a note from the FBI.
This describes an anonymous caller who claimed to have seen the girl in a vehicle associated not with Atwood but with a woman.
"The State of Arizona executed Frank Atwood despite persistent doubts about his guilt," said attorney Joseph Perkovich.
"The Frank Atwood case was circumstantial, and important evidence pointed to another suspect."
The mother of the murdered girl watched the execution.
After Atwood's death, she told reporters, 'Today marks final justice for our daughter, Vicki Lynne.
Our family has waited 37 years, eight months and 22 days for this day.«
Clarence Dixon, a 66-year-old convicted murderer, was executed in Arizona on May 11.
It was the first execution of a death penalty in the US state in about eight years.
The trigger was the execution of a convict in 2014. The double murderer only died after two hours of violent convulsions and 15 doses of poison.
bbr/AFP/AP
