A 79-year-old white American received a lethal injection Thursday, December 9 in the state of Oklahoma, becoming the last death row inmate executed in 2021 in the United States, where the death penalty continues to decline.
Bigler Stouffer was executed "
without complication
" at McAlester Penitentiary in the central United States, state corrections spokesman Justin Wolf said.
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His death brings the number of executions carried out in the United States this year to eleven, the lowest in decades, according to the Information Center on the Death Penalty (DPIC).
Bigler Stouffer was sentenced to death for the murder of a schoolteacher dating back to 1985.
Claiming his innocence, he had multiplied legal remedies over the next 36 years without convincing the judges.
On Thursday morning, the United States Supreme Court denied his latest petition, paving the way for his execution.
The septuagenarian had also filed, in vain, a request for pardon with the Republican governor Kevin Stitt.
The state pardon office had recommended commuting his sentence, not because of doubts about his guilt but questions about the lethal protocol in force in Oklahoma.
Eleven executions in 2021
The three-substance cocktail used in the state is suspected of causing excruciating pain in convicts, which the US Constitution prohibits.
At the end of October, a convict had been shaken by convulsions and had vomited multiple times after the first injection.
This was not the case Thursday, according to witnesses to the execution.
The death penalty has been declining in law and in practice for a decade in the United States. 23 states have abolished it, including Virginia this year, and three (California, Oregon, Pennsylvania) are observing a moratorium. The others are confronted with increasingly intense legal guerrillas, with a public opinion very sensitive to the doubts about the guilt of the condemned and to the supply problems of lethal substances, the big pharmaceutical companies not wanting to be associated with the sentence. of death.
At the start of the Covid pandemic, many states also suspended the application of the death penalty.
Against the grain, the administration of Donald Trump had however returned to federal executions, so that 17 death row prisoners were executed in 2020 in the country.
In 2021, that number has dropped to eleven, including three people executed by federal authorities just before Donald Trump left the White House.
The others all died in the conservative South of the country: Texas (3), Oklahoma (2), Alabama (1), Missouri (1) and Mississippi (1).
