Seven days before Christmas, Michael Wayne Nance stole an old Oldsmobile Omega car and drove to a Tucket bank office outside of Atlanta (Georgia). He entered with his face covered by a ski mask and gloves, and demanded cash, threatening a revolver of the .22 caliber. If he called the police, he told the cashier, she would be the first to die .
The bank employees, risking their lives, managed to introduce two packages with red paint and tear gas that were activated when Nance returned to his car. The man fled, leaving the money and mask behind but still wielding his revolver, and ran to the parking lot of a nearby liquor store. There he crossed with Gabor Balogh and sealed his destiny.
The thief approached Balogh, who had just left the store and was already in his car, backing up to leave his parking space. He opened the door of the vehicle and tried to get the man out, but he resisted and ended up receiving a shot that penetrated his chest and damaged his heart, ending his life.
Nance, who had previously berthed another bank in the same way, entrenched himself at a nearby gas station and told police: "If they take me out, it will be war . " During the trial, he explained that he had drunk champagne from the luxury brand Dom Perignon, and had consumed cocaine and marijuana before the theft.
He was sentenced to death.
The murder took place in 1993, but the sentence was reviewed, annulled and reimposed on several occasions until now, with 43 years of age, there are barely any options beyond appealing to the Supreme Court in February.
But he is not only fighting now for not dying, but also for how to die.
During these years, he claims to have taken increasing doses of a medicine against chronic back pain, which, he adds, has altered brain chemistry to jeopardize the effectiveness of the drug (pentobarbital) used in Georgia to execute by lethal injection.
That puts him at risk of a painful execution (which would go against the Constitution), which also adds that his veins are " seriously compromised, " he explains, and would be difficult to locate to inject the poison.
For all this, he has filed a lawsuit to be a firing squad who ends his life, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
"If you need a firing squad, let them do it," District Attorney Danny Porter responded, "it is certainly a unique request ."
Georgia used this method of execution in the past, although from 1924 it was changed to the electric chair . In 2001, when the state Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional, it was changed to lethal injection .
The last execution per firing squad was in 2012 in Utah. But Nance's case is not unique.
In 2017, another death row in Georgia, JW Ledford Jr., requested that mode of punishment also adducing the use of the same drug against back pain. Justice denied his request and was executed with lethal injection. His last words were: "You can kiss my white trash ass."
In Texas, in 2018, Danny Paul Bible also requested a firing squad considering that it would be impossible to administer the venom intravenously. Failing that, he required that nitrogen gas be administered to suffocate him . But that would have required a change in state laws, and the Supreme Court denied it
He didn't want to say a few last words, but when he began to feel the effects of the drug (the same, pentobarbital), with rapid breathing, he murmured: "It burns, it hurts . " Then he stopped moving and in a minute he was dead.
